1WRITE(1) User Commands WRITE(1)
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6 write - send a message to another user
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8 write user [ttyname]
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11 write allows you to communicate with other users, by copying lines from
12 your terminal to theirs.
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14 When you run the write command, the user you are writing to gets a
15 message of the form:
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17 Message from yourname@yourhost on yourtty at hh:mm ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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46 -h, --help
47 Display help text and exit.
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49 -V, --version
50 Print version and exit.
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53 A write command appeared in Version 5 AT&T UNIX (Jun 1974).
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56 mesg(1), talk(1), who(1)
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59 For bug reports, use the issue tracker at
60 https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.
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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/>.
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69util-linux 2.39.2 2023-06-14 WRITE(1)