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https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/wall.1.html

The OS X man page seems to be almost identical to the Linux one, at least at the beginning, wherein it mentions where the command takes input from. It states STDIN by default. However it doesn't mention needing superuser for reading from file, unlike the Linux man.

Consequently, reading from a file seems to be default behaviour, and wall on OS X simply looks for a file regardless of whether I've given given it a filename or an actual message, failing in the latter case.

As a stopgap I've been using a heredoc to send messages through wall

How do I make wall read from STDIN like it mentions in the manual?

Running OS X 10.10.3

EDIT: I'm not writing a script, I'm just typing in wall hello world into a zsh shell in Terminal on OS X. Same results with bash and sh.

EDIT 2: The response from the shell is actually
usage: wall [-g group] [file]
or
no such file or directory (if I surround the message with quotes)

4
  • Would you please add t the relevant parts of the script you are currently using so we can see the use case?
    – cxw
    Jun 22, 2015 at 9:46
  • I'm not writing a script. My use case is literally typing wall hello world into a zsh shell in Terminal on OS X. Jun 23, 2015 at 1:13
  • OSX wall reads from stdin just fine. When you run wall hello world, you're specifying the message on the command line, not stdin.
    – Kenster
    Jun 23, 2015 at 1:31
  • You're right, echo hello world | wall works. How does the Linux wall work then? It seems to automatically decide on taking the subsequent input as STDIN or a filename if it exists Jun 23, 2015 at 1:39

1 Answer 1

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So you saw that Linux uses a different version of wall than OS X, right? One is GNU and the other is BSD and they have different usages.

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