MPE/iX Shell and Utilities Reference Manual, Vol 2

write(1) MPE/iX Shell and Utilities write(1)
NAME
write — write to another user
SYNOPSIS
write user_name [terminal]
DESCRIPTION
Note: The MPE/iX implementation of this utility does not function exactly as this man page de-
scribes. For details, see the MPE/iX NOTES section at the end of this man page.
write sends a message directly to the terminal of another user logged in to the system. The
user_name argument indicates the user to whom you want to send your message. The termi-
nal argument is an optional identifier for use when the other user is logged in on more than
one terminal. The format of the terminal identifier is the same as returned by who.
When you issue a write command to send a message to another user, the other user receives
a message of the form
Message from your_name (terminal)[date] ...
When the system has established the connection to the other user, it sends two alert characters
(usually beeps) to your terminal to tell you that it is ready to send your message. You can then
type in your message and that message appears on the other user’s terminal. To end your mes-
sage, enter end-of-file or an interrupt (typically, CTRL-D for end-of-file or
CTRL-C for an inter-
rupt). When write receives an indication for end-of-message, it notifies the other user that
the message is over and breaks the connection. When you are using the
POSIX locale, write
does this by sending the string EOT to the other terminal.
The other user can reply to your message with
write your_user_name
However, if both of you are trying to write on each other’s terminal at the same time, the mes-
sages may get interleaved on your screens, making them difficult to read. For two-way con-
versations, use talk instead of write.
You can run a command while entering text to write. To do this, start a line with an excla-
mation mark (!) and put a standard system command on the rest of that line. write calls
your shell to execute the command.
1-702 Commands and Utilities