As a VPS or Dedicated Server account owner, you may want to check to see who is actively online and send a broadcast message to them. The short article below takes you through using the who and wall commands. Neither command requires root access.
How to see who is logged in
- Log into your account via SSH
- Run the
whocommand from the command prompt. This will list anyone who is currently logged in.# who
You should receive some output similar to the sample below. As you can see, the users root and bradm are logged in.
root pts/2 2013-01-25 12:53 bradm pts/3 2013-01-25 12:58
How to send a message to online users
Once you know who is logged into your server, you can send a message to them by using the
wall command.# wall This is a message <ctrl-d>
The users, including the sender, will see the message like the below sample.
Broadcast message from root (pts/2) (Fri Jan 25 12:52:25 2013): This is a message
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