nologin(8)

nologin8

Politely refuse a login

Usage

nologin

Overview

nologin displays a message that an account is not available and exits non-zero. It is intended as a replacement shell field for accounts that have been disabled.

If the file /etc/nologin.txt exists, nologin displays its contents to the user instead of the default message.

Releases

61 releases since OpenBSD 2.1; the text changed 5 times.

  1. 2.1–2.3
  2. 2.4
  3. 2.5
  4. 2.6–3.3
  5. 3.4–4.1
  6. 4.2–8.0

History

The nologin command appeared in 4.4BSD.

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.