On Thu, Mar 28, 2024 at 05:23:36PM +0100, Florent Rougon wrote: > Did anyone try 'mesg n' here? I tried: > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > $ mesg n > $ mesg; echo $? > is n > 1 > > Broadcast message from root@hostname (pts/1) (Thu Mar 28 16:48:13 2024): > > pouet
You can't stop root from writing to your terminal. Root has write privileges on all devices. The purpose of mesg is to allow *other regular users* to send you messages, or not. People have focused so much on "wall" in this thread, but wall is usually used by root, or by the OS itself, to send broadcast notices of major events like impending reboots. The more common tool for users to talk to each other on their terminals is write(1). Or if you wanted to have a conversation, there's talk(1). Or rather, there's supposed to be talk(1). I have a POSIX man page for it, but not a Debian one, and the program itself doesn't appear to be installed. Maybe it's in a separate package. I have write(1) from the bsdextrautils package. There is a talk package but I haven't installed it.
