Manual pages › System administration commands (1M)

comsat(1M)

biff server

From the original Amiga UNIX 2.1 manual. Some things it mentions may not be in this release.

NAME

comsat, in.comsat - biff server

SYNOPSIS

in.comsat

DESCRIPTION

comsat is the server process which listens for reports of incoming mail and notifies users who have requested to be told when mail arrives. It is invoked as needed by inetd(1M), and times out if inactive for a few minutes.

comsat listens on a datagram port associated with the biff service specification [see services(4)] for one line messages 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, To, Date, or Subject lines are not printed when displaying the message.

FILES

/var/utmp           who's logged on and on what terminals

NOTES