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nologin(8) — Linux manual page

NOLOGIN(8)                System Administration                NOLOGIN(8)

NAME         top

       nologin - politely refuse a login

SYNOPSIS         top

       nologin [-V] [-h]

DESCRIPTION         top

       nologin displays a message that an account is not available and
       exits non-zero. It is intended as a replacement shell field to
       deny login access to an account.

       If the file /etc/nologin.txt exists, nologin displays its contents
       to the user instead of the default message.

       The exit status returned by nologin is always 1.

OPTIONS         top

       -c, --command command

       --init-file

       -i --interactive

       --init-file file

       -i, --interactive

       -l, --login

       --noprofile

       --norc

       --posix

       --rcfile file

       -r, --restricted

       These shell command-line options are ignored to avoid nologin
       error.

       -h, --help
           Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
           Display version and exit.

NOTES         top

       nologin is a per-account way to disable login (usually used for
       system accounts like http or ftp). nologin uses /etc/nologin.txt
       as an optional source for a non-default message, the login access
       is always refused independently of the file.

       pam_nologin(8) PAM module usually prevents all non-root users from
       logging into the system. pam_nologin(8) functionality is
       controlled by /var/run/nologin or the /etc/nologin file.

HISTORY         top

       The nologin command appeared in 4.4BSD.

AUTHORS         top

       Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>

SEE ALSO         top

       login(1), passwd(5), pam_nologin(8)

REPORTING BUGS         top

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

AVAILABILITY         top

       The nologin 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
       2025-08-11. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that
       was found in the repository was 2025-08-05.) 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 2.42-start-521-ec46  2025-01-16                     NOLOGIN(8)

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