The rcvtty program executes the named command with the message as its standard input, and writes the resulting output on your terminal.

Alternately, if no command is specified (or is bogus), then rcvtty will instead write a one-line scan listing. The default output format of this scan listing may be overridden by using either the -form formatfile or -format string option, similar to the equivalent options for scan and inc. See mh-format(5) for details.

A newline is output before the message output, and the terminal bell is rung after the output. The -nonewline and -nobell options will inhibit these functions.

The switch -width columns may be given to specify the width of the scan line. The default is to use the width of the terminal.

In addition to the standard format escapes described in mh-format(5), rcvtty also recognizes the following additional component escapes:

Escape    Returns  Description
body      string   the (compressed) first part of the body
dtimenow  date     the current date
folder    string   the name of the current folder

By default, rcvtty will send its output to every terminal on the local machine that is owned by current user, and that has given write permission as granted by the command mesg(1). If the option -biff is given, then rcvtty will obey the notification status set by the command biff(1) instead.