The man page for write (and for wall on another well known distro) mention that mesg does not block the super-user. I suspect this may be the cause of the confusion. Shane > I tested it on i386 SL5.1 with 'write yellin pts/6', where "yellin" is my > username on that computer and "pts/6" is the ttyname on which I had typed > 'mesg n'. The 'write ...' command was blocked to that terminal, though not to > any of my other terminals for which 'mesg' returned "y". So as far as I can > tell, 'mesg n' does what it's supposed to do. > > Steven Yellin > > On Wed, 24 Nov 2010, Faye Gibbins wrote: > >> Anyone know why 'mesg n' doesn't stop 'write' anymore on SL5.x? -- Shane Voss, Computing Officer, School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.