freebsd-nq/share/man/man5/motd.5
Warner Losh 618cdd8964 Add more explicit instructions about updating motd
Not that you can regenerate the motd by editing motd.template and
running 'service motd restart' rather than rebooting.

Small wordsmithing by me, and updated the example from FreeBSD 2.1.6.1
release to 12.1 release.

Submitted by: Dan Mack
2020-10-19 01:16:39 +00:00

63 lines
1.4 KiB
Groff

.\" $NetBSD: motd.5,v 1.2 1994/12/28 18:58:53 glass Exp $
.\"
.\" This file is in the public domain.
.\" $FreeBSD$
.\"
.Dd October 18, 2020
.Dt MOTD 5
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm motd
.Nd file containing message(s) of the day
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The file
.Pa /var/run/motd
is normally displayed by
.Xr login 1
after a user has logged in but before the shell is run.
It is generally used for important system-wide announcements.
During system startup, a line containing the kernel version string is
prepended to
.Pa /etc/motd.template
and the contents are written to
.Pa /var/run/motd .
.Pp
.Pa /var/run/motd
can be updated without a system reboot by manually restarting the
motd service after updating
.Pa /etc/motd.template:
.Bd -literal -offset -ident -compact
service motd restart
.Ed
.Pp
Individual users may suppress the display of this file by
creating a file named
.Dq Pa .hushlogin
in their home directories or through
.Xr login.conf 5 .
.Sh FILES
.Bl -tag -width $HOME/.hushlogin -compact
.It Pa /etc/motd.template
The template file that system administrators can edit.
.It Pa /var/run/motd
The message of the day.
.It Pa $HOME/.hushlogin
Suppresses output of
.Pa /var/run/motd .
.El
.Sh EXAMPLES
.Bd -literal
FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE (GENERIC) #0: Sun Dec 29 03:08:31 PST 2019
/home is full. Please cleanup your directories.
.Ed
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr login 1 ,
.Xr login.conf 5
.Sh HISTORY
Prior to
.Fx 13.0 ,
.Nm
lived in
.Pa /etc .