Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a situation, where some script (running background) need to use the 'write' command and get a text to appeared on any screen of some particular user.
Like:

Code:

>echo "$message"|write user1

But I surprisingly realized, that if a person logged under any other name and after that uses the 'su' command to log in as the 'user1', he will not be reachable by the 'write' command!

Is there any other way to send a message to anyone who currently logged as 'user1', even by 'su'?

Edit user1's $HOME/.login

What do you mean, glen.barber?
What and with what intention anything should be edited?

You can have a message displayed at login by editing $HOME/.login For instructions, read the login manpage for your particular OS.

As far as writing to a user's screen from a script, I'm not aware of a way to do that. You can send that particular user mail output in your script.

Hi,
The write program writes text to a users tty. That is what the OP was talking about.
Yo should use the who command to figure out what terminal/xterm/whatever tty the user is using. The root user more often than not has messaging turned off by default. Use the mesg command to configure those rules.

And have a look at "man write" and "man mesg"

/Lakris

EDIT:
sorry, I guess I got carried away... I usually do an "ssh -X user@localhost" because I'm lazy and want X-forwarding, and then I always get a clean and obvious login. su'd users don't show up in who. So, I would find a way , with for example ps axjf to find the user You want to reach, find the tty, and find the owner of that tty...

this is very crude but I guess You get the idea...

Code:

lakris@landet:~$ ps axjf|grep 'su - grok'|grep -v grep
 7277  7300  7300  7277 pts/0     7306 S     1001   0:00      \_ su - grok
lakris@landet:~$ ps axu |grep 7277|grep -v grep
lakris    7277  0.0  0.3   5824  3200 pts/0    Ss   23:32   0:00 bash
lakris@landet:~$ write lakris pts/0
df sdf g
^Clakris@landet:~$

and in my other xterm it shows up as

Code:

lakris@landet:~$ su - grok
Password: 
grok@landet:~$ 
Message from lakris@landet on pts/2 at 23:44 ...
df sdf g
EOF

Hope it helps!

/L

It is not a solution to my situation - to have anything appeares on user's loggin!
First - I need it displayed right away (assuming, someone use that log name - user1 - in every given point of time)
Second - the 'user1' is not logging on - someone uses 'su' to use that account for some tasks!
The 'write' command perfectly works out what I need - it is showing a message on first found screen (tty) for a requested user, BUT it is fooled by the 'su' loggin.

Whell, it is a production control task that should inform about itself in some condition.
And you can guess, in different time different people performe 'production control' duties.
I do not need to have it write for a particular individual, but to an anyone who currently use the production control loggin 'user1'.

Than why the 'mailx' also is not comfortable.

Is there any idias for that task?

Lakris - thank you, now I've get it. I have to work through terminal and an actual user's id.
And thank you for example. I will try.

Glen, appreciate your responce, also!