UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Is there a way, as sysadmin, to put out system msgs, ie scheduled downtime, backup info, etc, whenever users log in?

You can put a message in /etc/motd - motd stands for message of the day.

This worked! Again, thank you!

Back to this again, is there a way to echo back information in the MOTD file for users? ie, i want to echo back to them that a certain disk is X% full today, df -k | grep /export/home is the command line, gives more information than i need, but how do I use it within the motd file since that is not a script file?

Thanks,

I don't believe you can put a script into the /etc/motd but you could have a cron job running updating MOTD every minute, hour, ....

Otherwise, you can add something to the 'system' login script to show another message

Check out the man page on login - it will give you the steps done for each login - you will find that it runs either /etc/profile or /etc/.login (it matters which shell is being used). You could possibly run something from there.

news command .. ( can put in the shell startup script )
Or calendar