Fun with Coworkers

Most of the information on this page comes from Dr. Bill Miller III at Truman State University.

In this section I have included some commands that are not extremely useful for productive work, but can make work more enjoyable by sending messages to your colleagues.

Send a Message to All Users' Terminal Windows

The wall command works very similar to the write command, except that instead of sending a message to only one person’s Terminal window, you send that message to every Terminal window open by all users currently logged into that computer, including yourself. To initiate a wall message, type

wall

This will bring you to the next line in your Terminal window. You can write as much or as little as you want. You can press enter to go to another line even; so you can send a multi-line message. Once you are done drafting your message, press ctrl+D on your keyboard to end the wall command and send the message to all users.

Notice that wall was entered, the message was written, and then ctrl+D was pressed (which you can’t actually see) to terminate wall and send the message to everyone. After ctrl+D was pressed, the message was also sent to my Terminal window, so the message shows up a second time after a Broadcast message that shows it was send from user me using the Terminal window pts/7. Pressing enter after receiving the message will bring up the command prompt again in the Terminal window.

Send a Message to a User's Terminal Window

The write command gives a user the ability to send a message directly to another user’s terminal window on the same computer. Before you send a message to a user, you need to decide what Terminal window you want to send your message to. For this, you should use the who command. This will allow you to see who has a Terminal window open on that computer, along with dates and times to see when each Terminal was opened by the user. To send a message to one of the Terminal windows you can use the write command. The general syntax is

write user window

For an example, if you want to send a message to a terminal called "pts/3" or a user named "theorysuite", I would type

write theorysuite pts/3

Once you hit enter to execute the command, you can type whatever you want as your message. You can press enter and it will continue to the next line (not send the message). When you are done typing your message and want to send it, press ctrl-D on the keyboard to end the command and send the message.

If the receiver of this message wants to send you a message back, they will need to know what Terminal window you are sending from so that you will see it on the same Terminal window you are writing from.