1WRITE(1)                         User Commands                        WRITE(1)
2
3
4

NAME

6       write - send a message to another user
7
8       write user [ttyname]
9

DESCRIPTION

11       write allows you to communicate with other users, by copying lines from
12       your terminal to theirs.
13
14       When you run the write command, the user you are writing to gets a
15       message of the form:
16
17           Message from yourname@yourhost on yourtty at hh:mm ...
18
19       Any further lines you enter will be copied to the specified user’s
20       terminal. If the other user wants to reply, they must run write as
21       well.
22
23       When you are done, type an end-of-file or interrupt character. The
24       other user will see the message EOF indicating that the conversation is
25       over.
26
27       You can prevent people (other than the superuser) from writing to you
28       with the mesg(1) command. Some commands, for example nroff(1) and
29       pr(1), may automatically disallow writing, so that the output they
30       produce isn’t overwritten.
31
32       If the user you want to write to is logged in on more than one
33       terminal, you can specify which terminal to write to by giving the
34       terminal name as the second operand to the write command.
35       Alternatively, you can let write select one of the terminals - it will
36       pick the one with the shortest idle time. This is so that if the user
37       is logged in at work and also dialed up from home, the message will go
38       to the right place.
39
40       The traditional protocol for writing to someone is that the string -o,
41       either at the end of a line or on a line by itself, means that it’s the
42       other person’s turn to talk. The string oo means that the person
43       believes the conversation to be over.
44

OPTIONS

46       -h, --help
47           Display help text and exit.
48
49       -V, --version
50           Print version and exit.
51

HISTORY

53       A write command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.
54

SEE ALSO

56       mesg(1), talk(1), who(1)
57

REPORTING BUGS

59       For bug reports, use the issue tracker at
60       https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.
61

AVAILABILITY

63       The write command is part of the util-linux package which can be
64       downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
65       <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>.
66
67
68
69util-linux 2.38.1                 2022-05-11                          WRITE(1)