NAME

     write — send a message to another user

SYNOPSIS

     write user [tty]

DESCRIPTION

     The write utility 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 super-user) from writing to you with the mesg(1)
     command.

     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 specifying 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 is the other person's turn to talk.  The
     string ‘oo’ means that the person believes the conversation to be over.

SEE ALSO

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

HISTORY

     A write command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX.

BUGS

     The sender's LC_CTYPE setting is used to determine which characters are safe to write to a
     terminal, not the receiver's (which write has no way of knowing).

     The write utility does not recognize multibyte characters.