User ralph sees this on his screen:write ralph
You can wait for ralph to respond, or you can begin typing your message. If the other user responds, you see a similar message on your screen.
Message from root on brooklyn (console) [ Tue Feb 26 16:47:47 ] ...
Type your message. As you press <Return>, each line of your message is displayed on the other user's screen.
Usually a write session is a dialogue, where each user takes turns writing. It is considered good etiquette to finish your turn with a punctuation mark on a line by itself, for example:
Entering the greater-than symbol indicates you are through with your paragraph and are waiting for user ralph to respond. The other user should choose a different punctuation character to indicate when he is through with his turn.
I noticed that you are using over 50 meg of disk space.Is there anything I can do to help you reduce that?>
You can prevent other users from writing to you with write by making their terminal or window unwriteable. Use the mesg command:
The n argument makes your terminal or window unwriteable, and the y argument makes it writable. The superuser can write to any terminal or window, even if the user has made his or her terminal unwriteable with mesg n.mesg n
The talk(1) utility is similar to write(1), and is preferred by some users.