.\" Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. .\" All rights reserved. .\" .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted provided .\" that: (1) source distributions retain this entire copyright notice and .\" comment, and (2) distributions including binaries display the following .\" acknowledgement: ``This product includes software developed by the .\" University of California, Berkeley and its contributors'' in the .\" documentation or other materials provided with the distribution and in .\" all advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software. .\" Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors may .\" be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without .\" specific prior written permission. .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED .\" WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF .\" MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. .\" .\" @(#)comsat.8 6.4 (Berkeley) 6/24/90 .\" .TH COMSAT 8 "June 24, 1990" .UC 5 .SH NAME comsat \- biff server .SH SYNOPSIS .B comsat .SH DESCRIPTION .I Comsat is the server process which receives reports of incoming mail and notifies users if they have requested this service. .I Comsat receives messages on a datagram port associated with the ``biff'' service specification (see .IR services (5) and .IR inetd (8)). The one line messages are of the form .PP .ti +0.5i user@mailbox-offset .PP If the .I user specified is logged in to the system and the associated terminal has the owner execute bit turned on (by a ``biff y''), the .I 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 included in the displayed message. .SH FILES .DT /var/run/utmp to find out who's logged on and on what terminals .SH "SEE ALSO" biff(1), inetd(8) .SH BUGS The message header filtering is prone to error. The density of the information presented is near the theoretical minimum. .PP Users should be notified of mail which arrives on other machines than the one to which they are currently logged in. .PP The notification should appear in a separate window so it does not mess up the screen.