How To Remove All Login Messages On FreeBSD

A step by step guide on how to remove all login messages / greetings when logging into 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 [Screenshot] Now this is all very nice the first 2 times you log in. After that you just want to get rid of it.

The standard login screen consists of 3 parts.

1: At the top we have the Regents of the University of California Copyright Notice.
2: In the middle we have the Message Of The Day or "motd" as it is also called.
3: At the bottom we have a random FreeBSD tip. Also known as "Fortune"

Let’s clear all of this.

We will start with just emptying the Message Of The Day file. The "motd" file which resides in /etc.

:> /etc/motd

Already better. Your login screen should now look like this [Screenshot]

Next we will remove the Regents of the University of California Copyright Notice. The Copyright notice acts a bit peculiar. It depends on the file COPYRIGHT (All In Capitals). which has it’s place in /etc as well.

If the file doesn’t exist a standard message will be displayed i.e. the message you see right now when logging into FreeBSD. So all we have to do is create an empty COPYRIGHT file in /etc and that will automatically be displayed instead of the Regents of the University of California Copyright Notice.

touch /etc/COPYRIGHT

And it’s gone. Your login screen should now look like this [Screenshot]

And last but not least the FreeBSD tip or "Fortune". This is controlled from within your profile in your home dir. So let’s remove this as well.

vi .profile

[ -x /usr/games/fortune ] && /usr/games/fortune freebsd-tips

And either delete the line or put a # in front of it. If you choose to put a # in front of the line it should now look like below.

# [ -x /usr/games/fortune ] && /usr/games/fortune freebsd-tips

And you will now have a nice clean login environment as shown here [Screenshot]

Either log out and in again or reload your profile. To reload your profile without logging out do the following.

source .profile