WRITE(1)

📦 version 2.37.2, in ubuntu jammy

💌 WRITE(1) — the write command, bestie edition 💌

okay so you found the write page in the User Commands section of the manual, and honestly? iconic. let's get into it 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

write — send a message to another user 💬

📜 SYNOPSIS 📜

write user [ttyname]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so write lets you talk to other users, bestie — it literally copies lines from your terminal over to theirs. it's giving pen pal but make it live. 💅

when you run write, the person you're writing to gets a message that looks like this:

Message from yourname@yourhost on yourtty at hh:mm ...

every line you type after that gets copied straight onto the specified user's terminal. and listen — if they wanna reply, they have to run write too. it's not automatic, it's mutual effort, fr fr. 😭

when you're done, you type an end-of-file or an interrupt character. the other person will see the message EOF, which is the universal signal for "conversation over, bye bestie" ✨

you can stop people (well, everyone except the superuser 👑) from writing to you by using the mesg(1) command. and heads up: some commands, like nroff(1) and pr(1), might automatically disallow writing so that the output they're producing doesn't get overwritten. rude but valid honestly. 🙈

if the user you wanna write to is logged in on more than one terminal, no stress — you can specify which terminal by passing the terminal name as the second operand to write. OR you can just let write pick for you: it goes with the one that has the shortest idle time. why? because if someone's logged in at work and dialed up from home, the message should land in the right place. so thoughtful. 🧚

and now for the traditional protocol, iykyk: the string -o, either at the end of a line or on a line by itself, means it's the other person's turn to talk. and the string oo means the person believes the conversation is over. periodt. 🎀

💖 OPTIONS 💖

  • -V, --version — shows you the version info and dips. ✌️
  • -h, --help — shows you the help text and dips. 🫶

🕰️ HISTORY 🕰️

a write command showed up all the way back in Version 6 AT&T UNIX. ancient. legendary. still here. 👑

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

mesg(1), talk(1), who(1)

🐛 REPORTING BUGS 🐛

found a bug? don't be shy, bestie — use the issue tracker at https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/issues.

📦 AVAILABILITY 📦

the write command is part of the util-linux package, which you can download from the Linux Kernel Archive https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.

✨ and that's the whole page, bestie ✨ this was util-linux 2.37.2, dated 2021-06-02, and yes she ate. no cap. 💖🦋🌸
📦 where this page comes from