wall(1) (1)

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NAME

wall - write a message to users

SYNOPSIS

wall [-n ] [-t TIMEOUT ] [file ]

DESCRIPTION

Wall displays the contents of file or, by default, its standard input, on the terminals of all currently logged in users. The command will cut over 79 character long lines to new lines. Short lines are white space padded to have 79 characters. The command will always put carriage return and new line at the end of each line.

Only the super-user 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

Supress banner

-t, --timeout TIMEOUT

Write timeout to terminals in seconds. Argument must be positive integer. Default value is 300 seconds, which is a legacy from time when people ran terminals over modem lines.

-V, --version

Output version and exit.

-h, --help

Output help and exit.

SEE ALSO

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

HISTORY

A wall command appeared in AT&T System v7 .

AVAILABILITY

The wall command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.

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