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 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 superuser) from writing to you with the mesg(1) command. Some commands, such as pr(1), disallow writing automatically, so that 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.
ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS
SIGINT
- Terminate
write
and exit with a zero status.
EXIT STATUS
The write
utility exits with one of the
following values:
- 0
- Normal behavior.
- >0
- The specified user is either not logged in or not accepting messages.
SEE ALSO
STANDARDS
The write
utility is compliant with the
IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (“POSIX.1”)
specification, except that in this implementation the sender's locale is
intentionally ignored in order to avoid sending characters that the
receiving terminal may be unable to display, or even bytes that might break
the receiving terminal's state. Non-ASCII characters are written as
‘?’.
HISTORY
A write
command appeared in
Version 2 AT&T UNIX.
BUGS
The “EOF” message seen when the other
write
terminates is indistinguishable from that
party simply typing “EOF” to make you believe that any future
messages did not come from them. Especially messages such as:
[1] Done rm -rf *