NAME

nologin —

a login shell for disabled users

SYNOPSIS

nologin [-m message]

DESCRIPTION

nologin is a login shell for user accounts that have been disabled. It logs the attempted login via the syslog(3) mechanism, with an ident of "nologin" and a facility of LOG_AUTH. Log entries will appear in the system log as:

Jan 28 21:36:54 hostname nologin:
  user on /dev/ttypX

If the optional message is specified with -m, it will be printed on the terminal, after the username, before the user is disconnected. Specifying -m "account not available" and attempting to login to the disabled user account "linus" would print the message

linus: account not
  available

on the terminal before exiting.

Please note that you should not add the nologin program to the /etc/shells file, as you do not want users to accidentally set their shell to nologin.

AUTHOR

Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>, Softweyr LLC.