# How do you remove the tip/suggestion/whatever that gets appended to MOTD?



## puppyboy (Sep 24, 2022)

On a newly installed FreeBSD server I have a custom MOTD which was set by modifying /etc/motd.template and restarting the motd server. It displays just fine. What is not fine though, is that there's an additional "tip" style message appended to my motd. So if I have my motd set to "`This is my MOTD`" and nothing else, I log into my server I will see something like this:


```
This is my MOTD
If you `set watch = (0 any any)' in tcsh, you will be notified when 
someone logs in or out of your system.
```

The tip thing changes on each login.
I've been Googling and can't find a thing about it, and I see nothing in any login script that might be doing it. motd(5) mentions only three relevant files, none of which appear to affect this. The shell in use is bash but I get the same behavior when setting the account to use sh by default.

How do I make it so my MOTD shows only my MOTD and nothing else?


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## mer (Sep 24, 2022)

I believe the bottom part is "fortune", typically in one of the script startups.
check your home directory, either the .profile or .login file

A simple thing to do for all users would be:
chmod a-x /usr/bin/fortune









						Guide On How To Remove All Login Messages On FreeBSD
					

A Step By Step Guide On How To Remove All Login Messages On FreeBSD When you normally log in to FreeBSD you'll be presented with a "lot" of greetings, messages copyright notice and motd "Message Of The Day". Now this is all very nice the first 2



					www.xfiles.dk


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## puppyboy (Sep 24, 2022)

Oh, you're right, it was fortune. When I first started trying to figure out this problem I'd actually thought that could be it, but since running fortune manually just tells me that there are no fortunes found, I had ruled it out. But removing permissions from it worked. Thanks


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## SirDice (Sep 26, 2022)

Just remove it from ~/.profile and ~/.login. And edit /usr/share/skel/dot.profile and/or /usr/share/skel/dot.login.

The whole point of having a ~/.profile and ~/.login is so users can customize it.


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