Is there a wall log?
There are some implementations of wall
that write to syslog, for
example http://salsa.debian.org/debian/sysvinit/blob/master/src/wall.c . In
its
manpage it
says:
For every invocation of wall a notification will be written to syslog, with facility LOG_USER and level BR LOG_INFO
If you cannot control application's behavior or tell it to use logger
instead of wall
you can create a wall
wrapper that would run a
regular wall
command and use logger
to write to syslog
. You can
either create this wrapper in a new directory, add it to your $PATH
and restart program that uses wall
with new $PATH
settings or,
especially if you cannot even restart the program, replace system-wide
wall
for everyone if you have enough permissions to do so. In this
example I will show you how to do the latter. First, rename existing
wall
program to wall.orig
:
$ command -v wall
/usr/bin/wall
$ sudo mv /usr/bin/wall /usr/bin/wall.orig
The new /usr/bin/wall
wrapper script could look like this:
#!/usr/bin/env sh
# wall wrapper - run wall commands with specified arguments and write
# a notification to syslog
wall.orig "$@"
logger "wall was ran with the following options: $*, result: $?"
Remember to make it executable:
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/wall
Use it like a regular wall
:
$ wall "test message"
Broadcast message from ja@comp (pts/14) (Sat Sep 14 22:34:43 2019):
test message
If you have a working logger
and syslogd
is running you should see
the following message log in one of the files in /var/log
that
syslogd
is routing the messages to:
Sep 14 22:34:43 comp ja: wall was ran with the following options: test message, result: 0
Of course, keep in mind that each time you will upgrade your system
using its built-in upgrade mechanisms it's possible that the original
/usr/bin/wall
binary will be restored again.
There is a logging level that will write to all logged in users with wall
logger -p emerg 'The sky is falling in'
The logger with write messages to the appropriate file under /var/log
. For emergency priority messages it will also send them to users with wall
.