MAIL.LOCAL(8) BSD System Manager’s Manual MAIL.LOCAL(8)

NAME

mail.local — store mail in a mailbox

SYNOPSIS

mail.local [-f from] user ...

DESCRIPTION

Mail.local reads the standard input up to an end-of-file and appends it to each user’s mail file. The user must be a valid user name.

The options are as follows:

-f from

Specify the sender’s name.

Individual mail messages in the mailbox are delimited by an empty line followed by a line beginning with the string ’’From ’’. A line containing the string ’’From ’’, the sender’s name and a time stamp is prepended to each delivered mail message. A blank line is appended to each message. A greater-than character (’’>’’) is prepended to any line in the message which could be mistaken for a ’’From ’’ delimiter line.

The mail files are exclusively locked with flock(2) while mail is appended.

If the ’’biff’’ service is returned by getservbyname(3), the biff server is notified of delivered mail.

The mail.local utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

ENVIRONMENT
TZ

Used to set the appropriate time zone on the timestamp.

FILES
/tmp/local.XXXXXX

temporary files

/var/mail/user

user’s mailbox directory

SEE ALSO

mail(1), xsend(1), flock(2), getservbyname(3), comsat(8), sendmail(8)

HISTORY

A superset of mail.local (handling mailbox reading as well as mail delivery) appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX. as the program mail.

BSD December 11, 1993 BSD