Sidebar: Viewing mesg Status

To see who is accepting or denying messaging via write, use the who -T command:

$ who -T
emmett   + ttya         Dec  6 08:42
root     + ttyb         Sep 15 19:24
karen    - tty0         Dec  5 12:40
kristin  + tty1         Dec  5 14:56
$

A minus sign (-) between the user name and terminal port indicates that the user is not accepting messages, while a plus sign (+) indicates the opposite. In this example, the only one who cannot be written to by other users is karen (but root, or superuser, has precedence over disable messaging).