Here's a link that describes %n and other such things, like %h.
(Ctrl-f %n It's a bit down the page).

http://www.ibiblio.org/oswg/oswg-nightly/oswg/en_US.ISO_8859-1/articles/gdm-reference/gdm-reference/x135.html

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 10:11 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 11:46 AM, Nathan Moore <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I submitted a request to the GDM documentation folks.  Thanks for the
>> pointer.
>>
>> Rephrasing my question: Let's say I have 50 machine in my cluster, with
>> hostnames "linux01" "linux02" ... "linux50"
>>
>> In previous versions of SL (SL5 and 6 at least), I could modify the login
>> banner to be "%n.university.edu" and then each of the machines would display
>> the appropriate login machine name, "linux01.university.edu" on the linux01
>> machine (for example).
>>
>> I assume that the %n referred to a shell variable, hostname, but I've never
>> checked.  That feature seems to be missing in RHEL7
>>
>> Nathan
>
> Is there some compelling reason not to use fully qualified hostnames
> on the systems, rather than relying on %n to publish the *short*
> hostname?



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