I have a CentOS 5.7 VPS using bash as its shell that displays a branded greeting immediately after logging in via SSH. I've been trying to modify it, but can't seem to find where it is in the usual places. So far I've looked in the motd
file and checked sshd_config
for banner file settings. A banner file is not set.
Where else can I look for where the login message might be?
Best Answer
Traditional unix systems display
/etc/motd
after the user is successfully authenticated and before the user's shell is invoked. On modern systems, this is done by thepam_motd
PAM module, which may be configured in/etc/pam.conf
or/etc/pam.d/*
to display a different file.The ssh server itself may be configured to print
/etc/motd
if thePrintMotd
option is not turned off in/etc/sshd_config
. It may also print the time of the previous login ifPrintLastLog
is not turned off.Another traditional message might tell you whether that
You have new mail
orYou have mail
. On systems with PAM, this is done by thepam_mail
module. Some shells might print a message about available mail.After the user's shell is launched, the user's startup files may print additional messages. For an interactive login, if the user's login shell is a Bourne-style shell, look in
/etc/profile
,~/.profile
, plus~/.bash_profile
and~/.bash_login
for bash. For an interactive login to zsh, look in/etc/zprofile
,/etc/zlogin
,/etc/zshrc
,~/.zprofile
,~/.zlogin
and~/.zshrc
. For an interactive login to csh, look in/etc/csh.login
and~/.login
.If the user's login shell is bash and this is a non-interactive login, then bash executes
~/.bashrc
(which is really odd, since~/.bashrc
is executed for interactive shells only if the shell is not a login shell). This can be a source for trouble; I recommend including the following snippet at the top of~/.bashrc
to bail out if the shell is not interactive: