mesg (1)

mesg [y|n]

Mesg controls the access to your terminal by others. It's typically used to allow or disallow other users to write to your terminal (see write(1)).

y

Allow write access to your terminal.

n

Disallow write access to your terminal.

If no option is given, mesg prints out the current access state of your terminal.

Mesg assumes that its standard input is connected to your terminal. That also means that if you are logged in multiple times, you can get/set the mesg status of other sessions by using redirection. For example "mesg n < /dev/pts/46".

Miquel van Smoorenburg ([email protected])

talk(1), write(1), wall(1)