Problems with /usr/sbin/wall

[Rachel Smith_1]

I am running HPUX 11.00.

The wall command does not seem to work. All users have can accept messages (I have this set in /etc/profile) :

$ mesg
is y

But when I use wall, nothing is sent out. If I run (as root) in one terminal :

# /usr/sbin/wall "Hello!"
Hello!??

But when I look at my other terminal window, which is just my normal user, nothing is posted. What am I doing wrong?

[Dave Hutton]

I swear I've done it from one line, but it didn't work for me either.

I had to:
#wall
Hi there

and it worked. I think wall bypasses mesg anyway since its the same command issued when you shutdown the server and everyone sees it anyway reguardless of your mesg.

Dave

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Rachel,

You have to ctrl-D to terminate & send the mesg.

HTH,
Jeff

[Dave Hutton]

Probably a better way out there but this worked also:
#echo "Hi there" | wall

Dave

[James A. Donovan]

From the man page....Without arguments, the wall command reads a message from standard input until end-of-file

Try..

# echo "Hello!" | wall

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Wall does not look at the command line for the message but rather stdin. You need to
do something like:
echo "Hello" | wall
or
wall < mytextfile
or a 'here docs' input, e.g.
wall <

[Rachel Smith_1]

I have tried both :

# echo "hello" | /usr/sbin/wall

and

# /usr/sbin/wall
hello
^d

The only difference I get is that hello is no longer echoed to my own screen with ?? appended to the end. So still no luck, any other suggestions???

[Dave Hutton]

I'm wrong when I said 'mesg y' doesn't matter. Looking at the man page it does.
Just wanted to clear that up.

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

In that case, apply PHCO_28718.

[Rachel Smith_1]

Great! I installed the patch and everything is working great!!!

Thanks!