[LinuxFocus-icon]
<--  | Map  | Index  | Search

News | Archives | Links | About LF
This document is available in: English  Castellano  ChineseGB  Deutsch  Francais  Italiano  Nederlands  Russian  Turkce  Polish  

[Photo of the Author]
by Mario M. Knopf (homepage)

About the author:

Mario enjoys working with Linux, networks and security related topics.



Translated to English by:
Mario M. Knopf (homepage)

Content:

 
PDF

LF tip: Customize motd & issue

[Illustration]

Abstract:

This is a short tip. From now on LinuxFocus will have at least one new tip every month. If you have some ideas for a new tip then send them to guido(Q)linuxfocus.org.

_________________ _________________ _________________

 

Introduction

Every user, who doesn't work exclusively in runlevel 5, has already seen the reports of the two ASCII files "motd" and "issue". To customize these for your individual needs, you can open the appropriate file in any editor and modify the content.

 

motd

The acronym "motd" stands for "message of the day". This file, which is used by the login program, can be found in the configuration directory "/etc" and displays a message after a successful login, but before the respective login shell starts. The file could look as follows:

$ cat /etc/motd
Have a lot of fun...
 

issue

The file "/etc/issue" can also be used to show reports on the screen. However, these messages appear before the login prompt. As a rule, the content of this file serves the system identification, however, it can be changed exactly like "motd" arbitrarily. For example, under Slackware 10 it looks like:

$ cat /etc/issue
Welcome to \s \r (\l)
The \s is replaced by the "operating system name" the \r by the "kernel version" and \l by the "terminal device name". You can find the description of these options in the mingetty(1) or getty(1) man-page.  

Talkback form for this article

Every article has its own talkback page. On this page you can submit a comment or look at comments from other readers:




Webpages maintained by the LinuxFocus Editor team
© Mario M. Knopf
"some rights reserved" see linuxfocus.org/license/
http://www.LinuxFocus.org
Translation information:
de --> -- : Mario M. Knopf (homepage)
de --> en: Mario M. Knopf (homepage)

2005-01-14, generated by lfparser version 2.52

mirror server hosted at Truenetwork, Russian Federation.