NAME
write —
send a message to another
user
SYNOPSIS
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 message 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 terminal. 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 super-user) from writing to you with the
mesg(1) command. Some commands,
for example
nroff(1) and
pr(1), disallow writing
automatically, so that your output isn't overwritten.
If the user you want to write to is logged in on more than one terminal, you can
specify which terminal to write to by specifying 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.