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man pages section 1: User Commands     Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 Information Library
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Preface

Introduction

User Commands

acctcom(1)

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zonename(1)

write

- write to another user

Synopsis

write user [terminal]

Description

The write utility reads lines from the user's standard input and writes them to the terminal of another user. When first invoked, it writes the message:

Message from sender-login-id (sending-terminal) [date]...

to user. When it has successfully completed the connection, the sender's terminal will be alerted twice to indicate that what the sender is typing is being written to the recipient's terminal.

If the recipient wants to reply, this can be accomplished by typing

write sender-login-id [sending-terminal]

upon receipt of the initial message. Whenever a line of input as delimited by a NL, EOF, or EOL special character is accumulated while in canonical input mode, the accumulated data will be written on the other user's terminal. Characters are processed as follows:

To write to a user who is logged in more than once, the terminal argument can be used to indicate which terminal to write to. Otherwise, the recipient's terminal is the first writable instance of the user found in /usr/adm/utmpx, and the following informational message will be written to the sender's standard output, indicating which terminal was chosen:

user is logged on more than one place.
You are connected to terminal.
Other locations are:terminal

Permission to be a recipient of a write message can be denied or granted by use of the mesg utility. However, a user's privilege may further constrain the domain of accessibility of other users' terminals. The write utility will fail when the user lacks the appropriate privileges to perform the requested action.

If the character ! is found at the beginning of a line, write calls the shell to execute the rest of the line as a command.

write runs setgid() (see setuid(2)) to the group ID tty, in order to have write permissions on other user's terminals.

The following protocol is suggested for using write: when you first write to another user, wait for them to write back before starting to send. Each person should end a message with a distinctive signal (that is, (o) for ``over'') so that the other person knows when to reply. The signal (oo) (for ``over and out'') is suggested when conversation is to be terminated.

Operands

The following operands are supported:

user

User (login) name of the person to whom the message will be written. This operand must be of the form returned by the who(1) utility.

terminal

Terminal identification in the same format provided by the who utility.

Environment Variables

See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of write: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.

Exit Status

The following exit values are returned:

0

Successful completion.

>0

The addressed user is not logged on or the addressed user denies permission.

Files

/var/adm/utmpx

user and accounting information for write

/usr/bin/sh

Bourne shell executable file

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE
ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Availability
SUNWcsu
CSI
enabled
Interface Stability
Standard

See Also

mail(1), mesg(1), pr(1), sh(1), talk(1), who(1), setuid(2), termios(3C), attributes(5), environ(5), standards(5)

Diagnostics

user is not logged on

The person you are trying to write to is not logged on.

Permission denied

The person you are trying to write to denies that permission (with mesg).

Warning: cannot respond, set mesg -y

Your terminal is set to mesg n and the recipient cannot respond to you.

Can no longer write to user

The recipient has denied permission (mesg n) after you had started writing.