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mesg - Permits or refuses write messages
mesg [-][y[es] | n[o]]
Interfaces documented on this reference page conform to industry standards as follows:
mesg: XPG4, XPG4-UNIX
Refer to the
standards(5)
reference page for more information
about industry standards and associated tags.
This permits other users to send messages to your terminal.
If no option is specified,
mesg
reports the current
state of message acceptance.
[Compaq] There are no operands to
mesg, but if the
optional (-) hyphen is omitted with the option, then the option becomes the operand
as described in the XPG4, XPG4-UNIX standard.
The mesg command controls whether other users on the system can send messages to you with the talk and write commands. Called without arguments, mesg displays the current terminal message permission setting.
[Compaq] The shell start-up procedure disallows messages by default. You can override this default action by including the line mesg y in your $HOME/.profile (sh), .cshrc (csh), or .login (csh) file.
[Compaq] This default setting described for the shell start-up procedure message permissions assumes that the shell is one started as part of a login session. If the shell got started by some other means, the default depends on what that other program has done.
[Compaq] Any user can send messages with write if the receiving user has enabled messages. A user with the sysadmin command authorization can send messages to any terminal.
The terminal device affected is determined by searching for the first terminal in the sequence of devices associated with standard input, standard output, and standard error, respectively. (In other words, the affected device is not the same as the controlling terminal for the session.)
[Compaq] Message permission has no effect on messages delivered through the electronic mail system.
[Compaq] If you add mesg y to your $HOME/.profile, you will be able to receive messages from other users via the write command or the talk command. If you add mesg n to your $HOME/.profile, you will not be able to receive messages from other users via the write command or the talk command.
The
mesg
command also accepts the current locale's
equivalent of
yes
and
no. These equivalents
are determined by the setting of the
LC_MESSAGES
environment variable. The usage message displays the current
locale's equivalent of
yes
and
no.
[Compaq] In the trusted configuration of the system, all terminal devices
have owner set to the login user and group set to the pseudogroup
tty. The
login
command sets terminal modes to
0600 at login time, so you must explicitly use
mesg y
to
enable access from unauthorized users.
[Compaq] If your current locale defines settings other than
yes
or
no, the
mesg
command
does not accept
yes
or
no
as arguments.
This causes an error if you use a
yes
or
no
argument to
mesg
in your
.profile
file.
The following exit values are returned:
Message reception is allowed.
Message reception is denied.
An error occurred.
To allow only appropriately authorized users to send messages to your terminal, enter: mesg no To allow everyone the permission to send messages to your terminal, enter: mesg yes To determine the state of message acceptance of your terminal, enter: mesg
The following environment variables affect the execution of
mesg:
Provides a default value for the internationalization variables
that are unset or null. If
LANG
is unset or null, the corresponding value from the default locale is used.
If any of the internationalization variables contain an invalid setting, the
utility behaves as if none of the variables had been defined.
If set to a non-empty string value, overrides the values of
all the other internationalization variables.
Determines the locale for the interpretation of sequences
of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to
multibyte characters in arguments).
Determines the locale for the format and contents of diagnostic
messages written to standard error.
Determines the location of message catalogues for the processing
of
LC_MESSAGES.
User profile
User profile (csh)
User profile (csh)
Your current terminal
Commands: chmod(1), csh(1), Bourne shell sh(1b), POSIX shell sh(1p), stty(1), talk(1), wall(1), write(1)
Functions: chmod(2)
Standards: standards(5)