wall(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | NOTES | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY

WALL(1)                       User Commands                      WALL(1)

NAME         top

       wall - write a message to all users

SYNOPSIS         top

       wall [-n] [-t timeout] [-g group] [message | file]

DESCRIPTION         top

       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.

OPTIONS         top

       -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.

NOTES         top

       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.

HISTORY         top

       A wall command appeared in Version 7 AT&T UNIX.

SEE ALSO         top

       mesg(1), talk(1), write(1), shutdown(8)

REPORTING BUGS         top

       For bug reports, use the issue tracker at
       https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.

AVAILABILITY         top

       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
       2023-12-22. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2023-12-14.) 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 2.39.594-1e0ad      2023-07-19                        WALL(1)

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