NAME

nologinmsg — politely refuse a login

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Nologinmsg displays a message that an account is not availavle and exits non-zero. It is intended as a replacement shell field for accounts that have been disabled. It can also print per-user messages, or special messages, depending on how it is called, or whether it can find a better message to print.

To create a per-user message, put the text of the message in /usr/local/etc/nologinmsgs/USER file. Its contents will be printed if the user names USER logs in.

To create a message that can be used for a group of users, create a symbolic link to a new name for the binary, and use that name. In the /usr/local/etc/nologinmsgs/ directory, place a text file of the same name, with the text you want printed when a user with this shell name logs in.

If the program name is not nologinmsg, then that file name is checked, and printed if that exists. If it does not, then the standard error is printed. If the program name is nologinmsg, and a user named file exists then that file is printed if possible, if not, the standard error message exists. In all other cases, the standard message is printed.

To disable all logins, investigage nologin(5).

SEE ALSO

login(1) nologin(5) nologin(8)

HISTORY

The nologinmsg command was written by Richard Rose and contributed to the FreeBSD Project This man page needs looking at and checking.