NAME

comsat - biff server SYNOPSIS

comsat 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 asso- ciated 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 char- acters 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. FILES

/var/run/utmp

to find out who's logged on and on what termi- nals

SEE ALSO

biff(1), inetd(8) BUGS

The message header filtering is prone to error. The density of the information presented is near the theoretical mini- mum.

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 netbug@ftp.uk.linux.org and include diffs/patches, compiler error logs or as complete a bug report as you are able. HISTORY

The comsat daemon appeared in 4.2 BSD .

Linux !NetKit? (0.17-pre-20000412)July 31, 1999