Send email to all local users

[cajunman4life]

Does anyone know of a qnd (quick-n-dirty, sorry for stealing your acronym scottro) way to send an email to all local users on a FreeBSD system?

It shouldn't matter much but I've replaced Sendmail with Postfix.

My idea was to create an alias in /etc/mail/aliases and list each user I want the mail to go to, but that could become cumbersome even at a few dozen users, let alone hundreds.

Surely I'm missing something here...

[bgobs]

man wall : )

i hope this is ok for you...

[cajunman4life]

Wall is cool and all, but what if the user isn't logged in? They won't get the message.

I have two ideas that are possible (but not necessarily practical).

I can:
1) Write the "email" directly to each file in /var/mail, which will effectively "email" every local user. However, even though I am "r00t" and system administrator and all, I don't want to feel creepy about "emailing" everyone, and while all I'm doing is appending a few lines to their mail files, it still doesn't seem responsible of me.

2) I can write a script to run via cron every so often that pulls a list from the passwd file and separates out only the necessary users (all users will have a range of valid UID's), and append that list to an alias in /etc/mail/aliases, then run postalias to update the aliases db.

I was really hoping there was some dark secret that I didn't know of, like "local@domain.tld" would deliver to all local users on the system.

[cajunman4life]

Hmm... looking at aliases(5), it looks like I can do :include: /path/to/file. So it looks like I'll be pulling usernames out of the passwd file, sending them to another file that is ":include:"ed, and run postalias / postfix reload every so often via cron.

Problem solved. Unless anyone else can come up with anything better.

[TerryP]

Skipping updating the aliases altogether and using a script to do it manually use the pw file + aliases file to send out the e-mails to each user via mail. So that the SMTP server doesn't need a poke nore the over head of file I/O to update the :included:'ed file?

[J65nko]

Originally Posted by cajunman4life

.... and run postalias / postfix reload every so often via cron.

I seriously doubt you need to do a postfix reload. With sendmail there is no need to.

[cajunman4life]

Originally Posted by J65nko

I seriously doubt you need to do a postfix reload. With sendmail there is no need to.

You're right, I don't think I do... but everything I read says to. Either way.

[J65nko]

It is quite simple to test whether the reload command is needed. I just did that test not long ago with my local sendmail

[scottro]

Doing reload isn't like stopping and starting it. It just makes postfix reread its configuration file with no effect, (at least that I've ever noticed) on mail delivery.