- published: 08 Jul 2013
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biff is a mail notification system for UNIX.
When a new mail message is delivered, the program biff alerts the recipient so he can read it immediately. The alert is sent to the tty where the recipient is logged in, and contains the Subject, From line, and first few lines of the body of the new message. The alert also includes terminal beeps to guarantee quick attention.
Notification is enabled by the command
and disabled by
Because the sudden, unexpected printing of a block of text on a tty can be annoying if it overwrites more useful information on the screen that can't be easily regenerated, biff is not used very much any more. Some modern MTAs do not even support comsat, making biff useless.
The general idea of the incoming mail alert has remained very popular even as the original biff and comsat have been almost completely abandoned. There are many biff replacements, several with similar names like xbiff, xlbiff, kbiff, gnubiff, wmbiff, imapbiff and xbuffy. The concept also extends outside the UNIX world — the AOL "You've got mail" voice could be seen as a talking biff.
Alfredo James "Al" Pacino (/pəˈtʃiːnɵ/; born April 25, 1940) is an American film and stage actor and director. He is famous for playing mobsters, including Michael Corleone in The Godfather trilogy and Tony Montana in Scarface, though he has also appeared several times on the other side of the law — as a police officer, a detective and a lawyer. His role as Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman won him the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1993 after receiving seven previous Oscar nominations, one of them being in the same year.
He made his feature film debut in the 1969 film Me, Natalie in a minor supporting role, before playing the leading role in the 1971 drama The Panic in Needle Park. Pacino made his major breakthrough when he was given the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Other Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor were for Dick Tracy and Glengarry Glen Ross. Oscar nominations for Best Actor include The Godfather Part II, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, ...And Justice for All and Scent of a Woman.