Controlling Biff

[Mark Towfigh]

In article <1579 at husc6.harvard.edu> schisto at popvax.harvard.edu (LTD)
writes:

       I would very much like to control the "biff" command.  As i've
   seen in the 4.3BSD manual and our on-line Ultrix 3.0 manual, i only
   have the option of turning biff on or off.  The control i seek would
   ideally allow me to set biff to write to screen as much of the incoming 
   message as i would like.  If the ideal isn't possible, then perhaps
   someone knows how to get biff to simply beep with either a simple
   message saying "you have mail" or no message at all.

You would have to modify the program comsat to perform the first
action you desire.  Biff is just a program which tells comsat if you
would like to be informed of incoming mail or not. I would suggest
that you do not want to bother doing this, however, because there is
another program, sysline, which notifies you of mail in just the way
you want: it displays only on the status line of your terminal, and
tries to display as much of the message as possible when it arrives.

Check out sysline, and seen if that isn't what you want; it doesn't
even mess up your screen!  You can't run it on a vt100, unfortunately,
but if you're running a vt100-clone, like a wyse85, that might have
such a capability built-in.
--
Mark Towfigh, Racal Interlan, Inc.                 towfiq at interlan.Interlan.COM
W: (508) 263-9929 H: (617) 488-2818                       uunet!interlan!towfiq

  "The Earth is but One Country, and Mankind its Citizens" -- Baha'u'llah