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 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  ter-
       minal 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.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.

util-linux							    March 1995								  WRITE(1)