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Bttf is a command line datetime Swiss army knife

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Re: Bttf is a command line datetime Swiss army knife

#14

Post by throw0101a »

yzydserd wrote: post #2

No, Biff informs the system whether you want to be notified when mail arrives during the current terminal session.

I.e.,

    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.
* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=biff

    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]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biff_(Unix)

Re: Bttf is a command line datetime Swiss army knife

#15

Post by burntsushi »

elcaro wrote: post #3

% biff 2026 M05 28, Thu 17:27:46 Ahh, the month of M05

This is a fair critique actually. And this shouldn't be the default. It is for now because I haven't gotten around to making Biff read your POSIX locale settings and converting them to a Unicode locale. If you build with `cargo build --release --features locale` (or get Biff from a release binary), then you can do:

    $ BIFF_LOCALE=en-US biff
    Thu, May 28, 2026, 6:38:09 AM EDT
If that doesn't work, then you can enable logging to see an error message:

    $ BIFF_LOCALE=watwat BIFF_LOG=warn biff
    2026-05-28T06:39:08.876336708-04:00[America/New_York]|WARN|src/main.rs:76: reading `BIFF_LOCALE` failed, using unknown locale `und`: failed to parse `BIFF_LOCALE` environment variable: The given language subtag is invalid
    2026 M05 28, Thu 06:39:08
What you're seeing is what ICU4X does when the user's locale is unknown or undetermined. The `M` prefix occurs to indicate that the number is the month, and is unrelated to the name. For example:

    $ BIFF_LOCALE=watwat biff time fmt -f '%c' '1 month'
    2026 M06 28, Sun 06:39:50

Re: Bttf is a command line datetime Swiss army knife

#16

Post by throw0101a »

roryirvine wrote: post #10
raverbashing wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I'm sure root is anxious to read all the mail in their local mailbox

Sending mail to root@ 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

Re: Bttf is a command line datetime Swiss army knife

#17

Post by teddyh »

throw0101a wrote: post #14
yzydserd wrote: post #2

No, Biff informs the system whether you want to be notified when mail arrives during the current terminal session.

I.e., 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. * https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=biff 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 notifica…

Also: https://manpages.debian.org/stable/biff/biff.1.en.html>

Re: Bttf is a command line datetime Swiss army knife

#19

Post by burntsushi »

yzydserd wrote: post #2

No, Biff informs the system whether you want to be notified when mail arrives during the current terminal session.

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

Re: Bttf is a command line datetime Swiss army knife

#20

Post by throw0101c »

burntsushi wrote: post #19
yzydserd wrote: post #2

No, Biff informs the system whether you want to be notified when mail arrives during the current terminal session.

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?

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