MAIL.LOCAL(8)

NAME
mail.local - store mail in a mailbox

SYNOPSIS
mail.local [-f from] [-b] [-s] 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.

-b  Turn off the attempts to notify the “biff” service.

-s  Turn off the fsync(2) call that forces the mailbox to be committed to disk before returning a “success” status.

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), flock(2), getservbyname(3), comsat(8), sendmail(8)

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