WALL(1) User Commands WALL(1)
NAME
wall – write a message to all users
SYNOPSIS
wall [-n] [-t timeout] [message | file]
DESCRIPTION
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 suid or sgid.
OPTIONS
-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.
-V, –version
Display version information and exit.
-h, –help
Display help text and exit.
NOTES
Some sessions, such as wdm, 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.
SEE ALSO
mesg(1), talk(1), write(1), shutdown(8)
HISTORY
A wall command appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.
AVAILABILITY
The wall command is part of the util-linux package and is available
from Linux Kernel Archive
⟨ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩.
COLOPHON
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
[email protected]. This page was obtained from the
project’s upstream Git repository
(git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git) on
2014-12-30. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML ver‐
sion 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 man‐
ual page), send a mail to [email protected]
util-linux August 2013 WALL(1)