[K12OSN] send message to specific user(s) with xmessage?

Calvin Park linuxsys at davisny.edu
Thu Sep 23 17:58:17 UTC 2004


We found a solution to this problem for our needs. Our Computer Center
closes at 10:00PM every night (at a College here) and so we wanted to
broadcast messages to all terminals at 9:45, 9:55, and 10:00 letting
users know that the lab would be closing. After a few hours in the LTSP
and KDE irc channels we found that the command

echo Your Message Here | wall

works quite well. It will broadcast a message to all terminals...and as
near as I've been able to figure KDE listens for echo with | wall and
broadcasts the message to all users (even if they are in a GUI instead
of the command line) using kwrited

So, This solution may not work at all if you're using GNOME. But it has
been a great help to us. Also, using the write command from a terminal
window has allowed our computer center techs to warn particular users.
Same thing, set mesg to yes, use the write command to a specific user
type in your message and it will pop up in kwrited on their screen. For
instance:

write jdoe 
Hey man...how's it going?
ctrl+c

Very handy. Again, I don't know if this will work with GNOME. 

Hope this all made sense. Let me know if it didn't.

-Calvin

On Thu, 2004-09-23 at 12:32, Huck wrote:
> Is there a way to use xmessage or some other program to send a message 
> to all or specific terminals?
> 
> 'wall' will do it to the command-line terminals...and 'write' should be 
> able to do the same as wall..but it doesn't work
> even though my user has 'mesg' set to yes
> 
> --Huck
> 
> 
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