Looks like I posted too soon. I received some more messages with good
information which I thought I would pass on.
Larry Griffith wrote:
I send messages to my users by inserting the following command
news | more
into the /etc/profile and /etc/csh.login files (which are system-wide scripts
executed at login). The news command prints any files in /usr/news that are
newer than ~/.news_time and then touches ~/.news_time . The effect is to
print only new messages.
Since I have a network, I make /usr/news a symbolic link to
/usr/local/news (/usr/local being NFS-distributed to all machines).
Bob Jones wrote:
The 'news' command might do what you're looking for. The sysadmin can put a
message in the /usr/news directory, and the user is alerted via the following
lines (you may prefer some variation of this) in the system-wide login script
if there are any news items that they have not yet read:
if ( "${whoami}" == "root") then
# Check for system news that would be new to this person.
if ( "`/usr/bin/news -s`" != "" ) then
echo ""
echo \*\*\* Type \"news\" to view current system news. \*\*\*
endif
The user still needs to manually type 'news', which we have found increases
the
regretfully slim chance that the user will actually read the news item(s).
By
default, the 'news' command (/usr/bin/news) cat's to stdout all news items
new
to the user. We define the following alias for news in our system-wide login
script to make it more user-friendly:
# Display news one screenful at a time.
alias news "news \!* | more"
See the news(1) man page for more details.
And Phil Farrell wrote that msgs source was available via anonymous ftp
from gatekeeper.dec.com, files in dir:
/pub/BSD/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/src/usr.bin/msgs
Thanks to all respondants!
Ellen Davis
Received on Wed Jul 02 1997 - 20:32:37 NZST