comsat —
biff
server
Comsat is the server process which receives reports
of incoming mail and notifies users if they have requested this service.
Comsat receives messages on a datagram port
associated with the “biff” service specification (see
services(5) and
inetd(8)). The one line messages are of the form:
user@mailbox-offset:/path/to/mailbox
If the
user specified is logged in to the system
and the associated terminal has the owner execute bit turned on (by a
“
biff y
”), the
offset is used as a seek offset into the
appropriate mailbox file and the first 7 lines or 560 characters of the
message are printed on the user's terminal. Lines which appear to be part of
the message header other than the “From” or
“Subject” lines are not included in the output.
- /var/run/utmp
- to find out who's logged on and on what terminals
biff(1),
inetd(8)
The message header filtering is prone to error. The density of the information
presented is near the theoretical minimum.
Users should be notified of mail which arrives on other machines than the one to
which they are currently logged in.
The notification should appear in a separate window so it does not mess up the
screen.
Please report bugs to
[email protected] and include diffs/patches,
compiler error logs or as complete a bug report as you are able.
The
comsat daemon appeared in
4.2BSD.