Background:
Much older (and less functional!) than Growl is rwall and rpc.rwalld,
used mainly
by NFS servers to announce to the users on their clients when they are
going
down, although system administrators in a mostly Unix/Linux/*BSD
environment
may choose to use it explicitly to send a message to their users,
since it can
send to all terminal sessions on a list of heterogenous systems, while
"wall" only' sends to local terminal users, and various other
mechanisms are Mac (or
Windows or whatever) specific.
Since I have a mix of Solaris and Mac OS X (at home!), I ported a
simple
FreeBSD implementation of rpc.rwalld to Mac OS X. It works as well
as that ever does, which is to say it just hands the incoming message
to "wall",
which in turn writes it to tty devices corresponding to users listed
by "who"
(unless they've turned off such messages for a given terminal with
"mesg n").
But Mac OS X users may well not have any terminal sessions open, in
which
case they'd never see the message.
rpc.rwalld is written in plain C, not Objective C, and runs as a
system process
not associated with any login session. On other systems, it may run
standalone
or under inetd, but on Mac OS X, I expect it to be started (if
enabled) by launchd,
_not_ on demand, but unconditionally, since I don't think launchd's
ability to act
a bit like inetd extends to handling (i.e. registering) ONC/RPC
services with
portmapper.
Since rpc.rwalld is expected to have only one instance per system, and
could
communicate with both ssh (telnet, rlogin, ...) and Terminal sessions,
it's not
appropriate to associate it with a particular console session.
So that brings me to my question:
[how] can I send a simple message (usually just a couple of lines of
text,
encoding unspecified but probably ASCII or a superset like UTF-8 or
ISO8859-*)
via Growl from rpc.rwalld? I don't want to receive any
acknowledgement or
even care to know if sending the message succeeded; whether the
message
stays on the screen until acknowledged doesn't concern me, although
if that can be up to the recipient to choose, that's best.
Ideally, I'd add this functionality to "wall", so that other programs
in a similar
fix could use it (as rpc.rwalld does), rather than adding it directly
to rpc.rwalld.
But I may skip that for my first attempt, since that would mean
replacing an
existing program ("wall") with a modified version, rather than simply
adding a
new one.
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