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WRITE(1)		     General Commands Manual			WRITE(1)

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 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 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 di-
     aled 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  be-
     lieves 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).

FreeBSD ports 15.quarterly	February 13, 2012			WRITE(1)

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