WRITE(1) User Commands WRITE(1)
NAME
write - send a message to another user
SYNOPSIS
write user [ttyname]
DESCRIPTION
write allows you to communicate with other users, by copying lines from
your terminal to theirs.
When you run the write command, the user you are writing to gets a mes-
sage of the form:
Message from yourname@yourhost on yourtty at hh:mm ...
Any further lines you enter will be copied to the specified user's ter-
minal. If the other user wants to reply, they must run write as well.
When you are done, type an end-of-file or interrupt character. The
other user will see the message EOF indicating that the conversation is
over.
You can prevent people (other than the superuser) from writing to you
with the mesg(1) command. Some commands, for example nroff(1) and
pr(1), may automatically disallow writing, so that the output they pro-
duce isn't overwritten.
If the user you want to write to is logged in on more than one termi-
nal, you can specify which terminal to write to by giving the terminal
name as the second operand to the write command. Alternatively, you
can let write select one of the terminals - it will pick the one with
the shortest idle time. This is so that if the user is logged in at
work and also dialed up from home, the message will go to the right
place.
The traditional protocol for writing to someone is that the string
`-o', either at the end of a line or on a line by itself, means that
it's the other person's turn to talk. The string `oo' means that the
person believes the conversation to be over.
SEE ALSO
mesg(1), talk(1), who(1)
HISTORY
A write command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.
AVAILABILITY
The write command is part of the util-linux package and is available
from https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
util-linux March 1995 WRITE(1)