The command line is a great environment for doing many things.

It can be used to
schedule commands, navigate directories, chain simple commands together to create
complex commands, automate system monitoring, and more. The flexibility that the
command line offers makes it worth investing the time into learning more about it,
as its power far exceeds that of GUI operating environments.

CLI environments, especially with multi-user systems such as servers, provide a

great way to communicate between users as well. Two tools in particular are of
great value: wall, which will communicate messages on all active consoles, and
mail, which will send e-mail via the command-line.

Wall is an interconsole "instant messenger" and is available on all Linux and UNIX
systems. With it, you can broadcast alert messages, such as an impending system
reboot or other maintenance process. Using wall is simple:

$ wall "just fooling around"

Broadcast message from vdanen (pts/16) (Mon Aug 4 20:47:03 2008):

just fooling around

Any user logged into the system will see the identical notice. The only exception
is when a user has set their "message" flag off. For instance, to disable seeing
these wall notices, use:

$ mesg n

$ mesg

is n

The mesg command takes exactly one of two arguments: y and n; if no argument is
supplied, it shows the current message value.

Another useful tool is the mail command, which will send e-mail messages on the
CLI. This can be used in conjunction with a command such as at to send reminder e-
mails, or it can be used to send an alert when a task or command is complete. There
are a few different providers of the mail command; some distributions use the mailx
package, others use nail, others the original Berkely mail package. If mail doesn't
work as expected, read the mail(1) manpage. Most mail commands use the same syntax
for the basics, however. To send an e-mail to an SMS relay to alert you of an
upcoming meeting, use:

$ echo "20 minutes to meet with Sally." | /bin/mail -s "Meeting" sms@myhost.com

This will send an e-mail with the subject "Meeting" to sms@myhost.com; the body of
the message will contain, "20 minutes to meet with Sally." As has been illustrated,
this can be used as a quick means of sending reminders, or it can be used to send
the output of jobs when completed. The mail command takes standard input as the
body of the message; other options can be used to specify CC and BCC recipients as
well.

E-mail messages sent via mail are sent from the calling user on the system's
hostname; for instance, if the user account joe were sending this on the system
foo.bar.org, then the e-mail would be seen to come from joe@foo.bar.org. Because of
this, you may want to ensure proper message rules are in place that permit the
relaying or reception of these addresses, or adjust the hostname of the computer
accordingly.
Get the PDF version of this tip here.