NAME
biff -- be notified if mail arrives and who it is from
[…]
HISTORY
The biff command appeared in 4.0BSD. It was named after the dog of
Heidi Stettner. He died in August 1993, at 15.
Eric Cooper, a student contemporary to Foderero and
Stettner, reports that the dog would bark at the mail
carrier,[4][5] making it a natural choice for the name
of a mail notification system. Stettner herself
contradicts this.[3][6]
From the excellent "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (by the late Peter H. Salus):
Heidi would bring her dog with her to class and to her office. He was a very friendly dog, and a lot of the students enjoyed throwing a ball for him down the corridor to fetch. He even had his picture on the bulletin board with the graduate students: the legend read that he was working on his Ph.Dog. John decided to name the program after the dog: Biff. According to Heidi, John and Bill Joy then spent a lot of time trying to compose an explanation for biff - they came up with "Be notified if mail arrived." Biff, who died in August 1993, at 15, once got a B in a compiler class. According to Heidi, the story of Biff barking at the mailman is a scurrilous canard.
One of my favourite bits of trivia from that excellent book, but hardly anyone I bump into these days knows anything about that kind of multi-user Unix experience/environment these days. I barely caught any of it myself.
If I type in "biff" on a Debian CLI, what should I expect the behaviour of the program that is executed to be? Will it be something about mail or time?
That's... not terrible. Biff isn't exactly popular (yet?), so a name change isn't out of the question. Both of those names (and `biff`) are already taken on crates.io. Which is maybe not a huge problem. IDK. Naming is hard.
I did. I always do. I just missed this one. Or if I saw it, it didn't register for me and felt like it was just an old archaic tool. Which... is probably still true, but I under-estimated its mindshare. Just an honest unknown unknown.
As the author of a different project also named Biff, I do have to warn you that half the comments on your HN posts will be people quoting back to the future--though I haven't decided yet if that's annoying or an engagement hack!
> Yeah the name collision is unfortunate, but probably fine.
collisions, lol
% apt-cache search biff
biff - a mail notification tool
gnubiff - mail notification program for GNOME (and others)
wmbiff - Dockable app that displays information about mailboxes
xlbiff - mail notification pop-up with configurable message scans
(along with 9 more matches without biff in command name)
2. All mail-notification utilities, as was the original biff.
And since we're mentioning Debian, it has a policy requiring unique names within the Debian archive to be unique. Precedence goes to the earlier software packaged. Installed programs must also have unique names within a given system. The datetime Swiss army knife utility discussed here violates both policies.
For those confused by this and a few similar threads/comments: the project name was originally "biff", but that was changed apparently due to the discussion on this submission, which has been retitled.
Sending mail to root@<whatever> really did use to be a pretty reliable way of getting somebody useful's attention - the early-to-mid 90s equivalent of making a "Can someone from Google please unlock my account?" post on HN.
Under Debian/Ubuntu, when Postfix is installed, part of the standard list of questions that dpkg-reconfigure asks you is how you want mail flow to work: you can give it a central smarthost. So any local mail gets sent on, and on the central mail hub you can tell it to send root@ to someplace useful:
I.e.,
* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=biff * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biff_(Unix)From the excellent "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (by the late Peter H. Salus):
Heidi would bring her dog with her to class and to her office. He was a very friendly dog, and a lot of the students enjoyed throwing a ball for him down the corridor to fetch. He even had his picture on the bulletin board with the graduate students: the legend read that he was working on his Ph.Dog. John decided to name the program after the dog: Biff. According to Heidi, John and Bill Joy then spent a lot of time trying to compose an explanation for biff - they came up with "Be notified if mail arrived." Biff, who died in August 1993, at 15, once got a B in a compiler class. According to Heidi, the story of Biff barking at the mailman is a scurrilous canard.
One of my favourite bits of trivia from that excellent book, but hardly anyone I bump into these days knows anything about that kind of multi-user Unix experience/environment these days. I barely caught any of it myself.
Yeah this was before my time. I never did email from a terminal. Which probably explains why I was okay with naming it Biff.
In any case, I've renamed the project to bttf: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bttf/pull/14
Thank you for helping maintain the Unix lore.
I dont think it's part of the unix standard. Biff sounds perfect
My decisions about naming aren't limited or prescribed by what is in a standard or not. :-)
Also: <https://manpages.debian.org/stable/biff/biff.1.en.html>
Yeah the name collision is unfortunate, but probably fine. The name Biff was just too good to pass up.
The name comes from the fact that Biff is a character in Back to the Future, and it rhymes with Jiff[1]. Jiff is the datetime library that Biff uses.
"Make like a tree and get out of here!" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9Jabplo2pZU
[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/jiff
> Yeah the name collision is unfortunate, but probably fine. The name Biff was just too good to pass up.
So if I do an "apt install biff" on Debian (or Ubuntu) what will happen?
* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=biff
If I type in "biff" on a Debian CLI, what should I expect the behaviour of the program that is executed to be? Will it be something about mail or time?
Per Debian policy and precedence of the email notification utility, you'll install biff, the command-line email notification utility:
<https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-binary.html#the-...>
<https://packages.debian.org/trixie/biff>
I know that if you want `fd` (https://github.com/sharkdp/fd) you need to `apt install fd-find` and which installs the binary `fdfind` (!).
I honestly don't know. Which is... Not Great.
It was a great opportunity to name a unix tool "mcfly" or just "Marty" for time manipulation. Better luck next time, I guess.
docbrown would be more appropriate, as the character who's actually doing the time manipulation.
That's... not terrible. Biff isn't exactly popular (yet?), so a name change isn't out of the question. Both of those names (and `biff`) are already taken on crates.io. Which is maybe not a huge problem. IDK. Naming is hard.
https://crates.io/search?q=bttf
// backronym bttf stands for biff time to format
You win the naming contest. The project has been renamed: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bttf/pull/14
@dang - Could you update the post title please to say "bttf" instead of "Biff"? Thank you!
I don't think @ tags have any effect on HN, you'll want to email the mods directly: hn@ycombinator.com
I like this
This is the fastest rebranding after a Show HN I think I’ve seen haha
also: back to the future
Intersting to notice that the name has been changed now when reading the post 12h late :-D
Burntsushi to the future
Naming is hard, sure, but doing some due diligence up front to see what's already being used isn't very difficult. Very neat tool.
I did. I always do. I just missed this one. Or if I saw it, it didn't register for me and felt like it was just an old archaic tool. Which... is probably still true, but I under-estimated its mindshare. Just an honest unknown unknown.
As the author of a different project also named Biff, I do have to warn you that half the comments on your HN posts will be people quoting back to the future--though I haven't decided yet if that's annoying or an engagement hack!
[1] https://github.com/jacobobryant/biff
Back to the Future jokes never get old. I love it.
I still want one of those hover boards!
hellooo short-shorts
https://preview.redd.it/75ojrs5mzfcg1.jpeg?width=1024&auto=w...
> Yeah the name collision is unfortunate, but probably fine.
collisions, lol
(along with 9 more matches without biff in command name)Those are:
1. Not precise name collisions.
2. All mail-notification utilities, as was the original biff.
And since we're mentioning Debian, it has a policy requiring unique names within the Debian archive to be unique. Precedence goes to the earlier software packaged. Installed programs must also have unique names within a given system. The datetime Swiss army knife utility discussed here violates both policies.
As Debian policy is used both for Debian and derived distros (see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions#De...> for a partial listing), it has considerable influence.
I've renamed the project to bttf :-)
That works on Debian ;-)
<https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=bttf>
Might want to ping the mods (hn@ycombinator.com) to update this submission title.
Edit: I'd typoed "bttf" as "btff" initially. Corrected shows partial but not exact matches on "libttfautohint1" and variants.
Griff is still available for future projects or Buford if you create a throwback project.
B1FF IS LIMITED TO 22 COLUMNZ
All short names, that is, pronounceable strings of 4 or maybe even 5 letters are already taken. Some of them taken many times over.
I think fewer people now care about mail notifications in a terminal session than about wrangling datetimes on the command line.
For those confused by this and a few similar threads/comments: the project name was originally "biff", but that was changed apparently due to the discussion on this submission, which has been retitled.
exactly. and chromium is a good looking space shooter with too few levels!
Yes I'm sure root is anxious to read all the mail in their local mailbox
Sending mail to root@<whatever> really did use to be a pretty reliable way of getting somebody useful's attention - the early-to-mid 90s equivalent of making a "Can someone from Google please unlock my account?" post on HN.
Under Debian/Ubuntu, when Postfix is installed, part of the standard list of questions that dpkg-reconfigure asks you is how you want mail flow to work: you can give it a central smarthost. So any local mail gets sent on, and on the central mail hub you can tell it to send root@ to someplace useful:
* https://wiki.debian.org/Postfix#Forward_Emails