NAME
comsat —
biff server
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
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
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
displayed message.
OPTIONS
The
comsat program supports this option:
-
-
- -l
- The -l option turns on
syslogd(8) log
messages.
FILES
To find out who's logged on and on what terminals
comsat
consults:
- /var/run/utmp
-
- /var/run/utmpx
-
SEE ALSO
biff(1),
services(5),
inetd(8),
syslogd(8)
HISTORY
The
comsat command appeared in
4.2BSD.
BUGS
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.
comsat runs as root so that it can open the user's
maildrop.