On occasion I will use the ‘net send’ command to fire off a quick message to anyone working on our servers. Usually in the form of a script that will notify everyone I am about to reboot. I was surprised to find it didn’t work at all when running under Vista (Well not that surprised)
After some digging around I found that Vista now has a new way to do this – the MSG command (I suspect the msg command has been around before that…but this is the first Windows OS where net send has been removed). Here is the syntax:
MSG {username | sessionname | sessionid | @filename | *}
[/SERVER:servername] [/TIME:seconds] [/V] [/W] [message] username Identifies the specified username.
sessionname The name of the session.
sessionid The ID of the session.
@filename Identifies a file containing a list of usernames,
sessionnames, and sessionids to send the message to.
* Send message to all sessions on specified server.
/SERVER:servername server to contact (default is current).
/TIME:seconds Time delay to wait for receiver to acknowledge msg.
/V Display information about actions being performed.
/W Wait for response from user, useful with /V.
message Message to send. If none specified, prompts for it
or reads from stdin.
If you wanted to send a single message to the server named ‘Server2003’ it would look like this:
C:\msg /server:Server2003 console “Server will be rebooted shortly – Please save your work asap!”
Now I can reboot my servers without giving someone a nasty surprise 🙂
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
If only this were true of my Windows Vista Home Premium!
C:\>msg
‘msg’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
got the same problem here,
‘msg’ is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
By any chance you you have Vista, or Windows 7 Home edition? If so, MS removed ‘MSG’ from those versions of Windows 🙁
It wasn’t removed the C:\> refers to where is is on the drive.
On both Vista & Windows 7 I can just typ MSG at any prompt:
Example C:\Users\\ is my prompt and I just type MSG and it works 🙂
Thanks Zan, that was helpful
Steve
Zan, you’re not right, MS Windows Home editions do not have these (domain) networking capabilities, only Professional and up can do this command.