nwrite copies lines from your terminal to the terminals of one
or more users. When called, it begins copying lines you type
to the recipient's terminal(tty). Before sending the first line
of text, nwrite prepends the message
Message from <name> on <tty> [to user [users ...]] at <time> ...
Communication continues until an end of file is read
from the terminal or an interrupt is sent. At that point
nwrite writes `EOF' (or `EOF (sendername)' if whoeof is set)
on the other terminal and exits.
If you want to write to a user who is logged in more than
once, the ttyname argument may be used to indicate the
appropriate terminal name, OR, you can let nwrite find the
first writable tty, and write to that. Additionally, you can
use the -i option to specify a number of minutes; ttys more
idle than the number you specify will be ignored when looking
for ttys to write to.
Permission to write may be denied or granted by use of the
mesg command. At the outset writing is allowed. Certain
commands, in particular nroff and pr(1) disallow messages in
order to prevent messy output.
NWRITERC
To control how incoming nwrites look to you, create a ~/.nwriterc
with lines of the form:
option value
Where value is either 0 or 1 (meaning no and yes) and option is one of:
headers
Display "user> " before each incoming line.
beep
Cause the terminal to beep when the message header comes through.
nodelay
Do not wait for the first line of input before displaying the
message header.
bold
Takes the following string values:
never
no bolding (default)
header
message header only
tag
message header and "login>" line tags
bold everything
showtarg
Used to control the behavior of the message header. Takes
the following string values:
never
never show recipient list
multi
only if more than one recipient (default)
always
always show recipients
whoeof
When sending EOF, append username to differentiate between many
Users at once like this: "EOF (user)".
Note that your home directory must be world executable and the .nwriterc
itself must be world readable.
EXAMPLE NWRITERC
headers 1
nodelay 0
beep 0
bold header
showtarg multi
OPTIONS
-a
arguments are zeroed so that the process table entry does not reveal
who you are writing to. (Not available on all systems.)
-i <minutes>
Ignore ttys more idle than <minutes> minutes.
FILES
/var/run/utmp
to find user
/etc/nwrite.rc
to set system default preferences
~user/.nwriterc
to obtain target's preferences
AUTHORS
Marco Nicosia, marco@csua.berkeley.edu, Summer 1993
Aaron C. Smith, aaron@csua.berkeley.edu, Summer 1994-Spring 1995
Alan Coopersmith, alanc@csua.berkeley.edu, Summer 1995-present
Master ftp site: ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/nwrite/
