Mesg

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mesg
Original author(s) Dennis Ritchie,
Ken Thompson
Developer(s) AT&T Bell Laboratories
Initial releaseNovember 3, 1971;48 years ago (1971-11-03)
Operating system Unix and Unix-like
Type Command

mesg is a Unix command that sets or reports the permission other users have to write to the current user's terminal using the talk and write commands.

Contents

Usage

It is invoked as:

mesg [y|n]

The 'y' and 'n' options respectively allow and disallow write access to the current user's terminal. When invoked with no option, the current permission is printed.

Input redirection may be used to control the permission of another TTY. For example:

% mesg is y% tty /dev/tty1% mesg < /dev/tty2 is y% mesg n < /dev/tty2 % mesg < /dev/tty2 is n% mesg is y

See also

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