Yep write is blocked but not wall. And as Shane says super user is not blocked. (Thanks Shane :-) ) What worried me is that the man page for wall says: snip--- Wall sends a message to everybody logged in with their mesg(1) permis- sion set to yes. snip--- But look at this test on Sl5.5: fgibbins@comp ~ 0$ tty /dev/pts/0 fgibbins@comp ~ 0$ mesg n fgibbins@comp ~ 0$ wall foo Broadcast message from fgibbins (pts/0) (Thu Nov 25 08:48:53 2010): foo fgibbins@comp ~ 0$ ls -l `which wall` -r-xr-sr-x 1 root tty 10484 Jan 21 2009 /usr/bin/wall fgibbins@comp ~ 0$ ls -l /dev/pts/0 crw------- 1 fgibbins tty 136, 0 Nov 25 08:50 /dev/pts/0 fgibbins@comp ~ 0$ Strange no? Faye PS I am not a super user. On 24/11/10 18:59, Shane Voss wrote: > 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? > > -- --------------------------------------------------------- Faye Gibbins, Sys Admin. GeoS KB. Linux, Unix, Security Beekeeper - The Apiary Project, KB - www.bees.ed.ac.uk --------------------------------------------------------- (x(x_(X_x(O_o)x_x)_X)x) I grabbed at spannungsbogen before I knew I wanted it. Socrates: Question authority, question everything. Mermin: If the maths works "Shut up and calculate!" The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.