NAME¶
write —
send a message to another user
SYNOPSIS¶
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¶
mesg(1),
talk(1),
wall(1),
who(1)
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).
The
write utility does not recognize
multibyte characters.
