## NAME

wall - write a message to all users

## SYNOPSIS

wall

timeout ]

## DESCRIPTION

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 suid or sgid.

## OPTIONS

-n, --nobannerSuppress the banner.

-t, --timeout \fItimeout\fRAbandon 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.

-V, --versionDisplay version information and exit.

-h, --helpDisplay help text and exit.

## NOTES

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

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

## HISTORY

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

## AVAILABILITY

The wall command is part of the util-linux package and is available from

Linux Kernel Archive