# The 'wall' command

## alienjon

Ok, so my roomate decided that he wanted to setup a Gentoo server and he and I were both going to be admins for it. This is a VERY laid back thing, mind you, (just us kind of goofing around with apache and such). I was thinking that it would be nice that if both he and I were ssh'ed at the same time, that we could send messages to each other. The rather ad-hoc way of doing this would be (from my experience) to use 'screen' but I was informed of another way (that sounds a lot closer to the actual usage that he and I would be using it for) by using the 'wall' command. If I run the command from my computer, then I see the message, but I cannot see it from his. The same goes vice versa.

I read the man page for wall (and mesg) and can't seem to figure out how to get it working. It looks like I need to set mesg to 'yes' but I don't know where or how to do that (I did try setting MESG=Y locally, but it still didn't work). Anyone use this command before, or otherwise know of a better method for this?

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## Headrush

Just type

```
mesg y
```

on his terminal to set it.

Then a

```
wall Hey buddy, can you hear me?
```

from your machine and he should see the message.

Edit: As yabbadabbadont mentioned, talk will indeed work and without you needing to both log into the server. Which is a better solution than using wall. (But strictly by your question, ssh and wall will work  :Smile:  )Last edited by Headrush on Wed Mar 01, 2006 4:57 am; edited 1 time in total

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## yabbadabbadont

Just call the mesg program with a parameter of y in your .bashrc.

e.g. mesg y

Make sure that you do this in both users .bashrc files.  Then you can use the "talk" program to, wait for it, talk to each other.   :Smile: 

man talk

for details.

This really brings back the old AT&T Sys V days when we used cu to dial into other Unix systems and chat.

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## alienjon

Hmm... Using a talk program to talk to each other. Ingeneous! I appreciate the tip (and added 'mesg y' to .bashrc for both his and my user) I'll be able to give wall a try later on, but talk doesn't seem to exist. It seems kind of weird because there's a man file there for the program, but when I run 'talk' I get a 'command not found.' Not in portage, either. (I did see something about 'ytalk' but I'm not sure if thats what you were referring to or not) The wall command does exist, by the way.

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## Monkeh

It is in portage, actually. net-misc/netkit-talk. The reason you have a man page for it is because it comes with sys-apps/man-pages.

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## alienjon

Thanks for the tip. I found/installed it but now I'm getting a 'talk: Server-y: Unknown host'.

My syntax is:

```

talk {ttyname}

```

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## yabbadabbadont

Are you both logged into the same machine?  If so, you should just be able to "talk bob", assuming that 'bob' is the user with whom you would like to talk.  If bob is logged in more than once, then "talk bob <one of bob's ttys>", to direct it to a specific tty.

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## alienjon

No, I'm on my desktop and he's on his laptop. (both running gentoo) The server is a third machine altogether

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## yabbadabbadont

If you are both logged into the server, and you have done "mesg y" on the server, and the server has talk installed, then you should be able to talk to each other.

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