Hal and I realized that in the previous episode we brought up a new topic but never explained it. I broke out the "msg" command, and he used "wall." In case you couldn't figure it out, these commands are used to send a message to users on the system.
The Windows command Msg is used to send a message to one or more users based on username, sessionname, or sessionid. The username is the most common way of directing a message to a user.
C:\> msg hal You have no chance to survive, make your time!
This command simply sends a message to Hal. As mentioned above, a message can also be directed based on the session name or id. To determine the session id or name refer to episode 62.
We can also send a message to all users on the system by using the asterisk.
C:\> msg * Someone set up us the bomb!
What if we don't want to send the message to all the users, but more than one user? We can do that! It does require that we have a file containing a list of usernames to whom we would like to direct our message.
C:\> msg @mostlyeveryone.txt Someone set up us the bomb!
We can also send the messages to users on other systems by using the /SERVER switch.
C:\> msg * /SERVER:otherbox All your base are belong to us!
However, this command doesn't just send messages, but also can be used to get an acknowledgment. The /V option displays information about which actions have been performed, such as sending a message and acknowledgments. The /W option waits for a response from the users. Say we send a message to Hal, and want to make sure he gets its, this is how we would do it:
C:\> msg hal /V /W Did you make your time?
Sending message to session Console, display time 60
Message to session Console responded to by user
The first message lets us know that a message was sent to Hal. The second means that either Hal responded, or the 60 second timer elapsed. Its a bit weird that the message is the same either way, but welcome to the wonderful world of Windows commands.
If we don't think that 60 seconds is long enough for Hal to respond, we can use the /TIME option to explicitly specify the duration of the message.
C:\> msg hal /V /W /TIME:3600 Did you make your time?
This command will wait one hour for a response; more than enough time for Hal to "make his time!"
By the way, these lost-in-translation quotes are taken from the internet meme All Your Base Are Belong To Us!. As a side note, I tried to use these quote in an earlier episode, but Hal corrected my grammar and fixed it. I can't believe Hal doesn't have endless hours to waste watching silly videos on the internet. Is that what the internet is for?
Hal is a little hard of hearing:
I guess I'm just having trouble keeping up with you kids and all your Internet shenanigans. But all of this writing to people's terminals is making me fondly remember my days using dumb terminals to talk with my friends on time-sharing systems. You can't type faster than 9600 baud, so who the heck needs 10Gbps? And get off my lawn!
If I wanted to tell Tim to get off my lawn, I could do that with the write command:
$ write tim
write: tim is logged in more than once; writing to pts/2
Get off my lawn!
^D
Specify the user you want to send a message to as an argument. As you can see, Tim is logged in on multiple PTYs, so the write command will by default send the message to the lowest numbered device. But you can specify a specific device to write to as an optional argument: "write tim pts/2", for example.
Once you hit return on the command line, anything you type in subsequent lines is sent to the specified user (each line normally gets sent immediately when you hit Enter). When you're done entering text, just hit <Ctrl>-D. Tim ends up seeing a message like this:
Message from hal@caribou on pts/1 at 16:43 ...
Get off my lawn!
EOF
Now random grumpy old men shouting into your terminal windows can be distracting when you're trying to get work done. So Tim has the option of blocking messages on his PTY with "mesg n":
$ mesg
is y
$ ls -l /dev/pts/2
crw--w---- 1 tim tty 136, 2 2011-01-10 16:50 /dev/pts/2
$ mesg n
$ ls -l /dev/pts/2
crw------- 1 tim tty 136, 2 2011-01-10 16:50 /dev/pts/2
With no arguments, the mesg command tells you what the current status of your PTY is-- the default is to be accepting messages, or "y". As you can see in the output above, running "mesg n" simply removes the group-writable flag from your PTY. The write command is set-GID to group "tty" so that it can write messages to users terminals when "mesg y" is set.
But in our last Episode, I used the wall command to send New Year's greetings to everybody on the system. In its simplest form, wall accepts input on the standard in and blasts it to all currently connected users:
$ echo Get off my lawn! | wall
And the users see:
Broadcast Message from hal@caribou
(/dev/pts/1) at 16:58 ...
Get off my lawn!
If you are the superuser, wall can also be used to write messages stored in a text file.
# wall /etc/shutdown-message
The other advantage to running wall as the superuser is that your message will even go to the terminals of those users who have set "mesg n". After all, "mesg n" works by changing permissions on the PTY devices, but root can write to any file regardless of permissions.
Now that I've educated you whipper-snappers on this outmoded technology, it's time for my nap. Why don't you kids go shoot some marbles or play with your hula-hoops?
