This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

WRITE(1)                  BSD General Commands Manual                 WRITE(1)

NAME
     write -- send a message to another user

SYNOPSIS
     write user [ttyname]

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'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), wall(1), who(1)

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

BSD                              June 6, 1993                              BSD