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Re: How do you broadcast a message?



On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 01:05:28PM -0500, William Jensen wrote:
> When you issue the reboot command the system does a system wide message
> saying the machine is rebooting NOW.  How would I send a message to all
> the people that are on the system?  I assume this would need to be done
> as root?

others have given you the command, and now you've gotta be
scratching your head wnodering "what the fritch does WALL have to
do with messaging other users? am i daft or is there something in
the water here?"

whether you're daft or not, i can't say. but there is method
behind the madness --

try

	man write

which will tell you how to send an on-screen message to another
user's console/xterm session. once the unix gurus came up with
WRITE, they figured it'd be nice for sysadmin folk to be able to
do "WRITE ALL" and being the lazy wonks they are, they abbreviate
the hell out of everything, coming up with

	wall

which is less strenuous on their precious fingertips than

	write-all

would be.

by the way -- you might be able to figure this kind of thing out
by using commands like

	apropos message | grep user
	man -k write

and then there's always

	apt-get install task-newbie-help

which has saved me many a time.

-- 
americans should never read anything so subversive as what's at
http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/03/21/spring/index1.html

will@serensoft.com
http://sourceforge.net/projects/newbiedoc -- we need your brain!
http://www.dontUthink.com/ -- your brain needs us!



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