WRITE(1)                                            Linux Programmer's Manual                                           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  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), may 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.

AVAILABILITY
       The  write  command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-
       linux-ng/.



                                                          12 March 1995                                                 WRITE(1)