WRITE(1) BSD General Commands Manual WRITE(1)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 termi-
nal 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).
BSD February 13, 2012 BSD
Check Out this Related Man Page
write(1) User Commands write(1)NAME
write - write to another user
SYNOPSIS
write user [terminal]
DESCRIPTION
The write utility reads lines from the user's standard input and writes them to the terminal of another user. When first invoked, it writes
the message:
Message from sender-login-id (sending-terminal) [date]...
to user. When it has successfully completed the connection, the sender's terminal will be alerted twice to indicate that what the sender is
typing is being written to the recipient's terminal.
If the recipient wants to reply, this can be accomplished by typing
write sender-login-id [sending-terminal]
upon receipt of the initial message. Whenever a line of input as delimited by a NL, EOF, or EOL special character is accumulated while in
canonical input mode, the accumulated data will be written on the other user's terminal. Characters are processed as follows:
o Typing the alert character will write the alert character to the recipient's terminal.
o Typing the erase and kill characters will affect the sender's terminal in the manner described by the termios(3C) interface.
o Typing the interrupt or end-of-file characters will cause write to write an appropriate message (EOT
in the "C" locale) to the
recipient's terminal and exit.
o Typing characters from LC_CTYPE classifications print or space will cause those characters to be sent to the recipient's terminal.
o When and only when the stty iexten local mode is enabled, additional special control characters and multi-byte or single-byte charac-
ters are processed as printable characters if their wide character equivalents are printable.
o Typing other non-printable characters will cause them to be written to the recipient's terminal as follows: control characters will
appear as a `^' followed by the appropriate ASCII character, and characters with the high-order bit set will appear in "meta" nota-
tion. For example, ` 03' is displayed as `^C' and `372' as `M-z'.
To write to a user who is logged in more than once, the terminal argument can be used to indicate which terminal to write to. Otherwise,
the recipient's terminal is the first writable instance of the user found in /usr/adm/utmpx, and the following informational message will
be written to the sender's standard output, indicating which terminal was chosen:
user is logged on more than one place.
You are connected to terminal.
Other locations are:terminal
Permission to be a recipient of a write message can be denied or granted by use of the mesg utility. However, a user's privilege may fur-
ther constrain the domain of accessibility of other users' terminals. The write utility will fail when the user lacks the appropriate priv-
ileges to perform the requested action.
If the character ! is found at the beginning of a line, write calls the shell to execute the rest of the line as a command.
write runs setgid() (see setuid(2)) to the group ID tty, in order to have write permissions on other user's terminals.
The following protocol is suggested for using write: when you first write to another user, wait for them to write back before starting to
send. Each person should end a message with a distinctive signal (that is, (o) for ``over'') so that the other person knows when to reply.
The signal (oo) (for ``over and out'') is suggested when conversation is to be terminated.
OPERANDS
The following operands are supported:
user User (login) name of the person to whom the message will be written. This operand must be of the form returned by the
who(1) utility.
terminal Terminal identification in the same format provided by the who utility.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of write: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MES-
SAGES, and NLSPATH.
EXIT STATUS
The following exit values are returned:
0 Successful completion.
>0 The addressed user is not logged on or the addressed user denies permission.
FILES
/var/adm/utmpx user and accounting information for write
/usr/bin/sh Bourne shell executable file
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
|Availability |SUNWcsu |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
|CSI |enabled |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
|Interface Stability |Standard |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
SEE ALSO mail(1), mesg(1), pr(1), sh(1), talk(1), who(1), setuid(2), termios(3C), attributes(5), environ(5), standards(5)DIAGNOSTICS
user is not logged on
The person you are trying to write to is not logged on.
Permission denied
The person you are trying to write to denies that permission (with mesg).
Warning: cannot respond, set mesg -y
Your terminal is set to mesg n and the recipient cannot respond to you.
Can no longer write to user
The recipient has denied permission (mesg n) after you had started writing.
SunOS 5.10 3 Nov 2000 write(1)