NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | ARGUMENTS | OPTIONS | EXIT STATUS | FILES | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | REPORTING BUGS | AVAILABILITY |
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MESG(1) User Commands MESG(1)
mesg - display (or do not display) messages from other users
mesg [option] [n|y]
The mesg utility is invoked by a user to control write access others have to the terminal device associated with standard error output. If write access is allowed, then programs such as talk(1) and write(1) may display messages on the terminal. Traditionally, write access is allowed by default. However, as users become more conscious of various security risks, there is a trend to remove write access by default, at least for the primary login shell. To make sure your ttys are set the way you want them to be set, mesg should be executed in your login scripts. The mesg utility silently exits with error status 2 if not executed on a terminal. In this case executing mesg is pointless. The command line option --verbose forces mesg to print a warning in this situation. This behaviour has been introduced in version 2.33.
n Disallow messages. y Allow messages to be displayed. If no arguments are given, mesg shows the current message status on standard error output.
-v, --verbose Explain what is being done. -h, --help Display help text and exit. -V, --version Print version and exit.
The mesg utility exits with one of the following values: 0 Messages are allowed. 1 Messages are not allowed. >1 An error has occurred.
/dev/[pt]ty*, /dev/pts/[0-9]*
mesg (I) appears in the UNIX Programmer’s Manual. It used to invert the current state with no argument before Version 7 AT&T UNIX.
login(1), talk(1), write(1), wall(1), xterm(1)
For bug reports, use the issue tracker at https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.
The mesg command is part of the util-linux package which can be
downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
<https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page
is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
utilities) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have
a bug report for this manual page, send it to
[email protected]. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2024-06-14. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
that was found in the repository was 2024-06-10.) If you discover
any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
or you have corrections or improvements to the information in
this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page),
send a mail to [email protected]
util-linux 2.39.594-1e0ad 2023-07-19 MESG(1)
Pages that refer to this page: wall(1)