biff?

biff?

[Byron Rakitzis]

I got sick of xbiff; both the annoying beep, and the ugly icon,
and I decided to replace it with the sweeter sound of a bell-
chime that I have for my sparcstation. Here's the rc script
that does the job:

#!/bin/rc

if (! ~ `{arch -k} sun4c)	# Are we on a sparcstation?
	exit

exec >[2] /dev/null		# Throw away errors from ls

mail=/usr/spool/mail/`whoami

fn getsize {			# Get the size of $mail in bytes
	size = `{ls -l $mail}
	size = $size(4)
	if (~ $#size 0)		# No output from ls?
		size = 0
	$1 = $size
}

fn ring {
	play -v 30 $h/lib/doorbell.au
	echo Mail received at `date > /dev/console
}

old = 0

while () {
	getsize new
	if (test $new -gt $old) {
		ring
		old = $new
	} else if (test $old -gt $new) {
		old = $new
	}
	sleep 10
}

There's not much here that's rc specific, except that I don't have
to call sed or awk in order to figure out the size of $mail.

I thought it was cute...

Re: biff?

[Mark-Jason Dominus]

> fn getsize {			# Get the size of $mail in bytes
> 	size = `{ls -l $mail}
> 	size = $size(4)
> 	if (~ $#size 0)		# No output from ls?
> 		size = 0
> 	$1 = $size
> }

Does this work at all?  On my machine $size(4) is `mjd', because there's
a double space between the permissions and the link count except when
the number of links exceeds 9.

-rw-------  1 mjd             0 Jun 28 16:24 /var/spool/mail/mjd

In fact, it's very difficult to get the size, because it's $size(17),
unless the size exceeds 9 bytes, in which case it's $size(16),  unless
the size exceeds 99 bytes, inwhich case it's $size(15)...

Who was it who said that the $ifs behavior was doing the right thing?