1 .\" Copyright (c) 1989 The Regents of the University of California.
2 .\" All rights reserved.
4 .\" This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by
5 .\" Jef Poskanzer and Craig Leres of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
7 .\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
8 .\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
10 .\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
11 .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
12 .\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
13 .\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
14 .\" documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
15 .\" 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
16 .\" must display the following acknowledgement:
17 .\" This product includes software developed by the University of
18 .\" California, Berkeley and its contributors.
19 .\" 4. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors
20 .\" may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
21 .\" without specific prior written permission.
23 .\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND
24 .\" ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
25 .\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
26 .\" ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE
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35 .\" Portions of the code documented by this man page are
36 .\" Copyright (C) 1991 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
37 .\" Please see the file COPYING for details.
40 .\" @(#)write.1 6.5 (Berkeley) 4/24/91
42 .\" Modified for Linux, Mon Mar 8 18:22:44 1993, faith@cs.unc.edu
43 .\" Modified to describe network write, Apr 29 1996, dholland@hcs.harvard.edu
47 .Os "Linux NetKit (0.17)"
50 .Nd send a message to another user
57 allows you to communicate with other users, by copying lines from your
58 terminal to theirs, possibly across the netwoerk.
62 command, the user you are writing to gets a message of the form:
64 .Dl Message from yourname@yourhost on yourtty at hh:mm ...
66 Any further lines you enter will be copied to the specified user's
67 terminal as you finish typing them.
68 If the other user wants to reply, they must run
72 When you are done, type an end-of-file or interrupt character.
73 The other user will see the message
78 You can prevent people (other than the super-user) from writing to you
82 Some commands, for example
86 disallow writing automatically, so that your output isn't overwritten.
88 If the user you want to write to is logged in on more than one terminal,
89 you can specify which terminal to write to by specifying the terminal
90 name as the second operand to the
93 Alternatively, you can let
95 select one of the terminals \- it will pick the one with the shortest
97 This is so that if the user is logged in at work and also dialed up from
98 home, the message will go to the right place.
100 The traditional protocol for writing to someone is that the string
102 either at the end of a line or on a line by itself, means that it's the
103 other person's turn to talk.
106 means that the person believes the conversation to be over. When this
107 protocol fails or is not used, you may find the "reprint" character,
110 An additional protocol that has developed locally: when conversing
111 with more than one person, place an identifier in parentheses, such
112 as (d), at the beginning of each line. This serves to distinguish
113 messages coming from different people, and also serves to indicate to
114 the person at the other end that they should do the same.
128 was developed by MIT in conjunction with Project Athena.