.\"
.\" Man page for bing
.\"
.\" Copyright (c) 1998 Ben H. Kram
.\"
.\" You may distribute under the terms of the GNU General Public
.\" License as specified in the README file that comes with the bing 1.0
.\" distribution.  
.\"
.\" Ben H. Kram
.\" jargon@cs.jhu.edu
.\"
.TH bing 1 "December 10, 1998"
.LO 1
.SH NAME
bing \- keep your terminal busy
.br
.SH SYNOPSIS
bing [\-i] [\-v] [\-f] [up]|down [bingtime]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B bing
watches your terminal and writes a space and a backspace (ascii 8)
every bingtime seconds.  This is designed to keep your connection up
if you live behind a firewall or want to keep that ppp connection
awake.
.B bing up
will run bing, which will fork off into the background.
.B bing down
will send bing a
.B SIGHUP
which will
.B kill
it.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B \-\^i 
Print information.  This just prints out what terminal you are using
and its last access time.
.TP
.B \-\^v
Print out version information.
.TP
.B \-\^f
force - deletes pidfile and runs bing; use if bing has been killed by something that isn't you.
.TP
.B \^up
This option is used to bring bing up (implied)
.TP
.B \^down
This will cause bing to look for the
.B .bing.pid
file that it created when it went up.  It will get the pid of the running 
.B bing
from it and send it a SIGHUP to tell it to die.  Then this will remove the
.B .bing.pid
file.
.TP
.B \^bingtime
This specifies the interval in seconds at which
.B bing
will bing.  Default is 30 seconds. 
.SH ENVIRONMENT
.TP
.B HOME
This is the only bit of environment that
.B bing
looks for.  If it can't find your home directory in your environment,
it will complain and stick its pid file in your present working directory.
.SH SEE ALSO
tty(1).
.SH AUTHOR
Ben H. Kram <jargon@cs.jhu.edu>
Special thanks to Ryan Brown.
.SH BUGS
.B Bing
can be run in an account at a time; future plans include the ability to run 
.B bings
on each terminal.
The 
.B \-\^f 
option is exclusive, so the time used is default.