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MAIL(1) General Commands Manual MAIL(1) NAME mail - send and receive electronic mail SYNOPSIS mail [-epqr] [-f file] mail [-dtv] [-s subject] user [...] OPTIONS -e # Exit with status TRUE or FALSE to indicate if there is mail in mailbox -p # Print all mail and then exit -q # Quit program if SIGINT received -r # Reverse print order, i.e., print oldest first -f # Use file instead of /var/mail/user as mailbox -d # Force use of the shell variable MAILER -t # Show distribution list as Dist: header in message -v # Verbose mode (passed on to MAILER) -s # Use Subject: subject EXAMPLES mail ast # Send a message to ast mail # Read your mail cat mail.cdiff | mail -s ''Here's the diff!'' asw # Pipe program output to mail with a subject line mail -f /var/mail/asw # How root can read asw's mail DESCRIPTION Mail is an extremely simple electronic mail program. It can be used to send or receive email on a single MINIX 3 system, in which case it functions as user agent and local delivery agent. If the flag MAILER is defined in mail.c, it can also call a transport agent to handle re- mote mail as well. No such agent is supplied with MINIX 3. When called by user with no arguments, it examines the mailbox /var/mail/user, prints one message (depending on the -r flag), and waits for one of the following commands: <newline> Go to the next message - Print the previous message !command Fork off a shell and execute command CTRL-D Update the mailbox and quit (same as q) d Delete the current message and go to the next one q Update the mailbox and quit (same as CTRL-D) p Print the current message again s [file] Save message in the named file x Exit without updating the mailbox To send mail, the program is called with the name of one or more recipients as arguments. The mail is sent, along with a postmark line containing the date. For local delivery, a file named after each recipient in the directory /var/mail must be writable. If a spool file does not exist for a recipient it will be created. If the directory /var/mail does not exist then the mail is dumped on the console, so that system programs have a way to notify a user on a system that does not have a mail spool. The received mail contains a To: header showing the recipient. If there are multiple recipients and the -t option is specified each recipient will also see a Dist: header line showing the other recipients. The -s option allows a subject to be specified. The subject must be quoted if it contains spaces. If no subject is specified the mail will be delivered with Subject: No subject. NOTES The -s option was added to make this simple mail program consistent with mail programs found in other *nix variants. Many programs, in- cluding the version of cron distributed with MINIX 3 releases 2.0.3 and later, report their outcome by piping output to the mail program in or- der to send a mail message to root in lieu of writing a log file. Such programs often expect the mail program to accept a subject line using this option. BUGS If an external MAILER is used it is likely the conditional code sup- porting this will need some editing to be made to work correctly. AUTHOR The original mail program for MINIX 3 was written by Peter B. Housel. The -e and -t options were added by C. W. Rose. The -s option was added by A. S. Woodhull. This man page revised by ASW 2003-07-18. MAIL(1)