Does each user get his/her own tty(s)?

Question

I put a simple echo command in a CLI tty by user1 expecting it to reach user2 who is logged in a separate tty.

echo "Hello, world!" >> /dev/tty5

I expected user2 to get the echo message but nothing shows up.

Does each user get his/her own "set" of tty[1-7]?

Edit: I suspect this may be a permissions issue. I was actually exploring cron jobs and had set a cron job to echo a "hello world" message every minute from user1 logged into tty2 directed to tty5 where user2 is logged in but user2 never got the echoed messages.

Have a look at the write command. That's more along the line of what you want. — Max, Dec 30 '12 at 19:24
What shell are you using? Did you get any error message? What is the output of echo "Hello, world!" >> /dev/tty5; echo $?? — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Dec 30 '12 at 23:44
@Gilles It's Bash for both users. System is a Centos 6.3 installation. — haziz, Dec 31 '12 at 01:12

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 30 '12 at 23:18

2

If user2 is logged into tty5, he is the owner of /dev/tty5. If he has messaging enabled, then you can send him a message using write user2, but if he doesn't, you're out of luck unless you are root. echo "Hello, world!" >> /dev/tty5 only works if executed by root or by user2.

answered Dec 30 '12 at 23:18

cpast

328

mesg y will enable receiving messages and mesg n will disable it.. – Gert van den Berg Dec 31 '12 at 08:17

Does each user get his/her own tty(s)?

1 Answers1