NAME
write —
send a message to another
user
SYNOPSIS
write |
user [tty] |
DESCRIPTION
The write utility 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.
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 is the other person's turn to talk. The
string ‘oo’ means that the person
believes the conversation to be over.
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
A write command appeared in
Version 1 AT&T UNIX.
BUGS
The sender's LC_CTYPE setting is used to
determine which characters are safe to write to a terminal, not the
receiver's (which write has no way of knowing).