lipm@quads.uchicago.edu (Everett Lipman) (09/12/90)
Hi. I recently wrote a program to do the job of biff, because our machine (a sun) does not notify us when mail arrives. During my early attempts, I ran across this problem: I had a file called "chkmail", which contained the following lines: ~/bin/cmail at now + 1 minute chkmail > /dev/null My intention was to have chkmail (which was marked executable) run from my .login, and continue until my .logout removed the "at" job. ~/bin/cmail checked for mail, and printed a message if mail had arrived. What I wanted was for the line ( job 4259 at 13:32 September 7 1990 ) which was generated by "at" not to be printed. Instead, it thought I meant "run chkmail, and redirect the output of chkmail to /dev/null". I tried to remove this ambiguity with backquotes, quotes, and parentheses, all of which failed. Does anyone know how I could do this without using an alias? BTW, I have realized that there is a better solution to the original problem (a background process). Everett Lipman (lipm@midway.uchicago.edu)