WRITE(1)                   OpenBSD Reference Manual                   WRITE(1)

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 mes-
     sage 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 termi-
     nal.  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),
     disallow writing automatically, so that your output 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 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's 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), who(1)

STANDARDS
     The write utility is compliant with the IEEE Std 1003.1-2008 (``POSIX'')
     specification.

HISTORY
     A write command appeared in Version 2 AT&T UNIX.

BUGS
     The ``EOF'' message seen when the other write terminates is indistin-
     guishable from that party simply typing ``EOF'' to make you believe that
     any future messages did not come from them.  Especially messages such as:

           [1]    Done                   rm -rf *

OpenBSD 4.7                    February 8, 2009                              1
