This is going to be short and sweet.

Does it bug you everytime you use bash on your linux box (via a terminal-emulator, ssh or otherwise), and it echos new mail notifications every five minutes? Well, if you are signed up to some high traffic mailing lists like I am, you will know my pain.

Here is how you ditch those notifications.
In /etc/profile comment out the following (or change the y to an n):

# Notify user of incoming mail.  This can be overridden in the user's
# local startup file (~/.bash.login or whatever, depending on the shell)
if [ -x /usr/bin/biff ]; then
 biff y
fi

Another option is to simply stop your computer from running the biff executable:

chmod -x /usr/sbin/biff

NOTE: This will make system-wide changes for every user. If you want to make the change only for one user, add biff n to their .bash_profile and/or .bashrc. (Bash login shells use .bash_profile; bash non-login shells use .bashrc)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 30th, 2005 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.