in.comsat

, comsat

- biff server

Synopsis

/usr/sbin/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/adm/utmpx

user access and administration information

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

See Also

svcs(1), inetadm(1M), inetd(1M), svcadm(1M),services(4), attributes(5), smf(5)

Notes

The message header filtering is prone to error.

The in.comsat service is managed by the service management facility, smf(5), under the service identifier:

svc:/network/comsat:default

Administrative actions on this service, such as enabling, disabling, or requesting restart, can be performed using svcadm(1M). Responsibility for initiating and restarting this service is delegated to inetd(1M). Use inetadm(1M) to make configuration changes and to view configuration information for this service. The service's status can be queried using the svcs(1) command.