During user login, a Linux box might show message of the day(motd), new email, or package updates information. This is particularly common in Ubuntu boxes. In some cases, you want to prevent all these messages from being displayed as it could be delaying your login for instance.

Solution – Create a file named .hushlogin in the user’s home directory.

A typical login to an Ubuntu box might look like this –

[daniel@kauai etc]$ ssh practice
daniel@practice's password: 
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-39-generic x86_64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com/

  System information as of Sat Jan 10 11:37:24 EST 2015

  System load:  0.0                Processes:           290
  Usage of /:   46.1% of 45.15GB   Users logged in:     1
  Memory usage: 13%                IP address for eth0: 192.168.10.206
  Swap usage:   0%

  Graph this data and manage this system at:
    https://landscape.canonical.com/

168 packages can be updated.
63 updates are security updates.

You have new mail.
Last login: Sat Jan 10 11:37:26 2015 from linux.local

To suppress all this information, create a .hushlogin file in the users home directory and log out and login back –

daniel@linubuvma:~$ touch ~/.hushlogin

daniel@linubuvma:~$ exit
logout
Connection to practice closed.

[daniel@kauai etc]$ ssh practice
daniel@practice's password: 

daniel@linubuvma:~$