Bug#1115259: bsdutils: The wall command as in bsdutils/Trixie does not work

[Alexander Sulfrian]

Hi,

On Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:52:06 +0100 Vincent Lefevre <vinc...@vinc17.net> wrote:

On 2025-11-17 13:58:18 +0000, Paul Kerry wrote:
> Is this then a loginctl/systemd related issue?

If "wall" expects the terminal to be part of the loginctl output,
then unfortunately, no login sessions have an attached TTY in my
case. But anyway, all terminals should normally be listed because
the goal is that the user should have the information at least in
the terminal he/she is watching. So I suppose that bugs should be
reported against these terminals (as this is where utmp was

handled).I debugged it further: "wall" works by using the TTY information from

logind. So all sessions that do not have a TTY in logind will not get notified by "wall."

Thanks,
Alex

Logind gets the TTY from the PAM_TTY attribute. SSH does not set the TTY while executing the PAM session hooks because it allocates the TTY later, and may not have to allocate a TTY at all. So SSH sets PAM_TTY to "ssh", and logind ignores the TTY if it is set to "ssh". What confused me was that logind on Bookworm does show the TTY information for SSH connections. It turns out that on Bookworm, logind is using the TTY information from UTMP. However, UTMP was removed in Trixie. So we need another way to set the TTY for the logind session to make "wall" work again.

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