How to customize the login message on Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS

Solution 1:

To customize the pre-login message, such as to create a login banner, you need to edit /etc/issue file.

To customize post-login messages, you can edit some of the files in /etc/update-motd.d. Such files as 00-header and 10-help-text in that directory are safe to edit.

Another possibility is to add a custom function/command to your .bashrc at the end of the file.

For instance, I have the following function defined at the top of my .mkshrc file :

 testTTY(){

  isTTY=$(tty | awk '{if ($0~/\/dev\/tty.*/) {print "true"}else{print "false"}}')

  if [ "$isTTY" = "true" ]; then
    printf "You are in virtual console\n"
    printf "current disk usage is"
    df
  fi
}

And I call the function at the end of .bashrc with just testTTY. As you can see from the code, the function determines if I logged in into TTY or not, and if it is TTY, it shows appropriate message and output of dfcommand

Solution 2:

The configuration files are in /etc/update-motd.d. motd stands for the message of the day.