mailleds - blink keyboard LED lights when mail arrives

mailleds [ -ahkqtxM ] [ -l [ cnspX ] ] [ -d dpyname ] [ -m filename ] [ -u user ] [ -i interval ]

mailleds is an unobtrusive mail notifier daemon. mailleds runs in the background and monitors your mailbox. If the mailbox file does not exist, mailleds will wait until it does. (Some programs, such as mailx, remove the mailbox when it is empty) When new mail arrives, it will flash LED lights, which can be any of the three standard LEDs on a keyboard, or LEDs hooked up to a parallel port as outlined in led-stat.txt. The LEDs blink until you read your mail. mailleds does not interfere with the current status of the keyboard settings: though the Num Lock LED may blink, the actual state of Num Lock will remain whatever it was.

Due to limitations of the ioctl system call, mailleds must be run setuid root.

-a, --answering-machine

Runs mailleds in `answering-machine' mode, which, instead of blinking the scroll lock LED off and on, blinks out the number of new messages, pauses, and repeats.

-i, --interval <msec>

sets blink-time-on and blink-time-off to 50.000ms and time between on and off to <msec>ms

-d, --display dpyname

Specifies the name of an X display whose leds are to be flashed. Implies -x.

-l, --leds [ cnspX ]

Specifies which LEDs to blink. cnspX is a string consisting of any combination of c, n, s, and pX. c, n and s indicate that caps lock, num lock and scroll lock, respectively, are to be blinked. pX indicates a led hooked up to a parallel port to be blinked, where X is a number from 1 to 8 that indicates the led to be blinked. For more information on this type of led, see led-stat.txt in mailleds source directory.

-h, --help

Displays a synopsis of options.

-k, --kill

Kills off the currently running mailleds daemon.

-q, --quiet

Makes mailleds die silently when there is already a mailleds process running for the user. This is useful for running mailleds out of .profile, .cshrc, etc.

-m, --mailbox filename

Uses filename as the user's mailbox.

-M, --maildir

Specifies that the mailbox is a maildir.

-t, --ttys

Specifies that mailleds is to blink virtual console leds. mailleds reads login information from utmp to figure out which vt's must be blinked. This is the default option.

-u, --user user

Runs mailleds "as if you were" user. This option causes mailleds to ignore the environment variable "MAIL". Mailleds will never exit of its own accord when this option is specified, and is therefore useful for running mailleds on system-boot. You must be the superuser to specify this option.

-x

Tells mailleds to latch on to the current X display and flash those keyboard leds. This is the same as calling mailleds as "xmailleds".

MAIL

specifies a default mailbox.

mailleds shouldn't interfere with screen blanking.

xmailleds and mailleds will interfere with each other (if the X server is run from the console via xinit(1x) or similar.)

Benjamin Osheroff (mtr@ratbert.bagel.org) on 27 Mar 1996 Adjusted by Dennis Stampfer (seppy@debian.org)

setleds(1), newmail(1), tty(4), portato(1)