rwall(1) — Commands
NAME
rwall − Write to all users over a network
SYNOPSIS
/usr/sbin/rwall hostname ... /usr/sbin/rwall -n netgroup ... /usr/sbin/rwall -h hostname -n netgroup
FLAGS
-n netgroup
Send the broadcast message to the specified network groups.
-h hostname
Specify the hostname, the name of the host.
DESCRIPTION
The rwall command reads a message from standard input until end-of-file. It then sends the following message to all users logged in on the specified host machines, preceded by the line:
Broadcast Message ...
With the -n flag, it sends to the specified network groups.
Note, the timeout is fairly short to allow transmission 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.
A remote host only responds if it is running the rwalld daemon, which is normally started up from inetd(8).