UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello all,
I'm looking for a way to have motd display something different when users log in based on what groups they belong to. I'm network administratinng at a college and professors would like to have different posts come up to students when they log in based on the different classes they are enrolled in. If /etc/motd doesn't support this, is there somewhere else I should explore?
Thanks,
hoppese

I would not want to call this impossible, but it would be very hard and dangerous and there is a better approach to do what you want.

/etc/motd is display because the shells are reading common scripts at login time. For sh, bash, and ksh it is /etc/profile. For csh it might be /etc/.login or some other file. You will need to check the man pages for each shell in use on your system to be sure. But each of these startup scripts will have a "cat /etc/motd" somewhere in them. Just add you own code to do whatever else is needed.