How To Install biff on Debian 10
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install biff on Debian 10.
What is biff
biff is:
biff is a small program that prints a message to your terminal when new email arrives. Actually, the message is printed by the comsat daemon, and biff just enables/disables the u+x permission flag for the terminal, which comsat uses to determine whether or not to write to your terminal.
biff is mainly of historic interest, since there are much better alternatives (such as xlbiff and gbuffy) that are network-aware and do not require a daemon. Although there are no known security problems, running additional services is often considered risky.
By default, the biff service is disabled. To use biff email notification, you must enable this service by running ‘update-inetd –enable biff’ after the package is installed. You may also need to modify the configuration of your mail transport agent to enable comsat notification.
There are three methods to install biff on Debian 10. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install biff Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install biff using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install biff
Install biff Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install biff using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install biff
Install biff Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install biff using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install biff
How To Uninstall biff on Debian 10
To uninstall only the biff package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove biff
Uninstall biff And Its Dependencies
To uninstall biff and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 10, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove biff
Remove biff Configurations and Data
To remove biff configuration and data from Debian 10 we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge biff
Remove biff configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove biff configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge biff
Dependencies
biff have the following dependencies:
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install biff package on Debian 10 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.