4 wall-notify is a simple program which receives all messages written by wall
5 and passes them to a notification program via stdin. It's designed for
6 simplistic desktop environments (like tiling window managers) or GNU
7 Screen/Tmux sessions to notify the user about important messages like reboots.
8 It was inspired by KDE's knotify.
10 wall messages are either directly created by root with the `wall` command or
11 sent by other programs like `reboot`, `shutdown` or other processes like NFS
12 to warn users when the NFS server terminates.
14 Optionally X11 can be used to automatically terminate wall-notify when the
15 current X11 session terminates, i.e. when the user logs out. See below.
17 wall-notify is licensed under GPL 3 (or later).
24 - libutempter or utmpx.h (utmpx.x requires a setgid utmp binary)
26 - optional: X11 headers and library, necessary for X11 support
32 ./configure && make && make check
34 If libutempter is not available, the binary must be setgid utmp:
36 chgrp utmp src/wall-notify
37 chmod g+s src/wall-notify
43 To dump all wall messages to stdout use:
47 All arguments passed to `wall-notify` are used when execing the process, e.g.
48 to replace all spaces with underlines use:
50 ./src/wall-notify sed 's/ /_/g'
52 To display the messages with `xmessage` use:
54 ./src/wall-notify xmessage -file -
56 However this will display '^M' (carriage-return) and other control characters
57 in the message. For a simple wrapper script which removes those, see
58 `contrib/message-helper`:
60 ./src/wall-notify contrib/message.sh xmessage -file -
62 The shell is not used when running the program.
65 If X11 support is compiled in then the '-X' option can be used to terminate
66 wall-notify automatically when the X session quits. This is useful when
67 wall-notify is started in `.xinitrc` and should quit when the X session ends,
68 i.e the user logs out:
70 ./src/wall-notify -X cat
73 By default only messages from root are displayed. To allow messages from other
74 users (which includes `rwalld` in most setups) the option '-m' must be used.
80 Doesn't work on OpenBSD which has no support for utmpx.h.
82 If you find any bugs not mentioned in this document please report them to
83 <simon@ruderich.org> with wall-notify in the subject.
89 Written by Simon Ruderich <simon@ruderich.org>.
95 wall-notify is licensed under GPL version 3 or later.
97 Copyright (C) 2014-2015 Simon Ruderich
99 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
100 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
101 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
102 (at your option) any later version.
104 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
105 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
106 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
107 GNU General Public License for more details.
109 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
110 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.