NAME

rwall − write to all users over a network

SYNOPSIS

rwall hostname ...
rwall −n netgroup ...
rwall −h host −n netgroup

DESCRIPTION

Rwall reads a message from standard input until end-of-file.  It then sends this message, preceded by the line “Broadcast Message ...”, to all users logged in on the specified host machines.  With the -n option, it sends to the specified network groups, which are defined in netgroup(5).

A machine can only receive such a message if it is running rwalld(8), which is normally started up by the daemon inetd(8).

SEE ALSO

wall(1), netgroup(5), rwalld(8C), shutdown(8)

BUGS

The timeout is fairly short in order to be able to send to a large group of machines (some of which may be down) in a reasonable amount of time.  Thus the message may not get through to a heavily loaded machine. 

7th Edition  —  4 August 1986