wall(1M) System Administration Commands wall(1M)NAMEwall - write to all users
SYNOPSIS
/usr/sbin/wall [-a] [-g grpname] [filename]
DESCRIPTIONwall reads its standard input until an end-of-file. It then sends this
message to all currently logged-in users preceded by:
Broadcast Message from ...
If filename is given, then the message is read in from that file. Nor‐
mally, pseudo-terminals that do not correspond to rlogin sessions are
ignored. Thus, when using a window system, the message appears only on
the console window. However, -a will send the message even to such
pseudo-terminals.
It is used to warn all users, typically prior to shutting down the sys‐
tem.
The sender must be superuser to override any protections the users may
have invoked See mesg(1).
wall runs setgid() to the group ID tty, in order to have write permis‐
sions on other user's terminals. See setuid(2).
wall will detect non-printable characters before sending them to the
user's terminal. Control characters will appear as a " ^ " followed by
the appropriate ASCII character; characters with the high-order bit set
will appear in "meta" notation. For example, `\003' is displayed as
`^C' and `\372' as `M−z'.
OPTIONS
The following options are supported:
-a Broadcast message to the console and pseudo-terminals.
-g grpname Broadcast to the users in a specified group only, per
the group database (see group(4)).
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
If the LC_* variables (LC_CTYPE, LC_TIME, LC_COLLATE, LC_NUMERIC, and
LC_MONETARY) are not set in the environment, the operational behavior
of wall for each corresponding locale category is determined by the
value of the LANG environment variable. See environ(5). If LC_ALL is
set, its contents are used to override both the LANG and the other
LC_* variables. If none of the above variables are set in the environ‐
ment, the "C" (U.S. style) locale determines how wall behaves.
FILES
/dev/tty*
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
┌─────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┐
│ ATTRIBUTE TYPE │ ATTRIBUTE VALUE │
│Availability │SUNWcsu │
└─────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┘
SEE ALSOmesg(1), write(1), setuid(2), attributes(5), environ(5)NOTESwall displays ``Cannot send to ...'' when the open on a user's tty file
fails.
SunOS 5.10 13 Jul 1994 wall(1M)
