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| NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | NOTES | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY | |
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WALL(1) User Commands WALL(1) wall - write a message to all users
wall [-n] [-t timeout] [-g group] [message | file]
wall displays a message, or the contents of a file, or otherwise its standard input, on the terminals of all currently logged in users. The command will wrap lines that are longer than 79 characters. Short lines are whitespace padded to have 79 characters. The command will always put a carriage return and new line at the end of each line. Only the superuser can write on the terminals of users who have chosen to deny messages or are using a program which automatically denies messages. Reading from a file is refused when the invoker is not superuser and the program is set-user-ID or set-group-ID.
-n, --nobanner Suppress the banner. -t, --timeout timeout Abandon the write attempt to the terminals after timeout seconds. This timeout must be a positive integer. The default value is 300 seconds, which is a legacy from the time when people ran terminals over modem lines. -g, --group group Limit printing message to members of group defined as a group argument. The argument can be group name or GID. -h, --help Display help text and exit. -V, --version Print version and exit.
Some sessions, such as wdm(1x), that have in the beginning of utmp(5) ut_type data a ':' character will not get the message from wall. This is done to avoid write errors.
A wall command appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.
mesg(1), talk(1), write(1), shutdown(8)
For bug reports, use the issue tracker <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.
The wall command is part of the util-linux package which can be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux utilities) project. Information about the project can be found at ⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual page, send it to util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository ⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on 2025-02-02. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the repository was 2025-01-30.) If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org util-linux 2.41.devel-938-0a... 2025-01-15 WALL(1) Pages that refer to this page: mesg(1), systemctl(1), systemd-ask-password(1), systemd-tty-ask-password-agent(1), logind.conf(5), poweroff(8), shutdown(8), systemd-ask-password-console.service(8), systemd-journald.service(8), telinit(8)
| HTML rendering created 2025-02-02 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. | |