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/>.