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.

       -V, --version
              Display version information and exit.

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

NOTES         top

       Some sessions, such as wdm, 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.

SEE ALSO         top

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

HISTORY         top

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

AVAILABILITY         top

       The wall command is part of the util-linux package and is available
       from Linux Kernel Archive 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩.

COLOPHON         top

       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
       2018-02-02.  (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that
       was found in the repository was 2018-02-01.)  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                       August 2013                         WALL(1)

Pages that refer to this page: mesg(1),  systemctl(1),  systemd-ask-password(1),  systemd-tty-ask-password-agent(1),  halt(8),  shutdown(8),  systemd-ask-password-console.service(8),  telinit(8)

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