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 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 indi‐
cating that the conversation is over.
You can prevent people (other than the super-user) from writing to you with the mesg(1) command. Some com‐
mands, for example nroff(1) and pr(1), may disallow writing automatically, so that your output isn't overwrit‐
ten.
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.
AVAILABILITY
The write command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.ker‐
nel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
util-linux March 1995 WRITE(1)
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