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 superuser) from writing to you with the mesg(1)
       command. Some commands, for example nroff(1) and pr(1), may automatically disallow
       writing, so that the output they produce 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 giving the terminal 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.

OPTIONS

       -h, --help
           Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
           Print version and exit.

HISTORY

       A write command appeared in Version 5 AT&T UNIX (Jun 1974).

SEE ALSO

       mesg(1), talk(1), who(1)

REPORTING BUGS

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

AVAILABILITY

       The write command is part of the util-linux package which can be downloaded from Linux
       Kernel Archive <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>.