HELP! Biff (and talk) problems...

[Rahul Dhesi]

In article <7029 at saturn.ucsc.edu> humtech at ucschu.ucsc.edu (Mark Frost) writes:
>Ever since we upgraded
>our ISI V16 to 4.3 BSD we have never received on-line notification of
>new mail...

I discovered a long time ago that if I enabled "pseudo-device inet" in
our 4.3BSD configuration file, "talk" worked but "biff" didn't.  If I
didn't enable that device, "biff" worked but "talk" didn't.  Since the
4.3BSD documentation is less than spectacular, I simply tossed a coin,
decided "talk" was more useful than "biff", allowed that pseudo-device
to stay in, and resigned myself to a biff-less existence.

You might want to set csh's "mail" variable like this:

     set mail=(30 /usr/spool/mail/$USER)

which will cause csh to check for mail every 30 seconds.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <dhesi at bsu-cs.bsu.edu>
UUCP:    ...!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi