From eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU Mon Nov 5 13:32:39 1990 SUM: Mark W. Eichin ->suggest SUB: ".forward" equivalent for write Received: by E40-PO.MIT.EDU (5.45/4.7) id AA12543; Sun, 4 Nov 90 02:46:14 EST Received: from PORTNOY.MIT.EDU by ATHENA.MIT.EDU with SMTP id AA03604; Sun, 4 Nov 90 02:46:11 EST Received: by PORTNOY.MIT.EDU (5.61/4.7) id AA19963; Sun, 4 Nov 90 02:46:08 -0500 Date: Sun, 4 Nov 90 02:46:08 -0500 From: Mark W. Eichin Message-Id: <9011040746.AA19963@PORTNOY.MIT.EDU> To: suggest@ATHENA.MIT.EDU Subject: ".forward" equivalent for write When Zephyr fails or is unavailable, several Athena systems (such as OLC) and users (various consultants and individuals) fall back to using "write". However, ttys deal very badly with multiple sources of input (such as Zephyr, emacs, any curses program, and write.) My personal solution (which others use as well) is to remain in emacs during the entire dialup session, running zwgc as a subprocesses, and letting emacs mediate the display of Zephyrgrams. The problem is that this is not possible with "write" messages. The only alternative to having them wipe what is already on the screen is to disable them entirely, thus often leaving no way at all to contact the user. My suggestion is that we have writed look for a ".write-forward" file in the destination user's homedir. If it is missing, use the current behavior; if it is there, treat it as a .forward file would be - look for either "|program" or ">file" and send the message appropriately. The most likely uses for this would be to have "|zwrite self" or something particular to an emacs write-mode, or to have some program listening on a unix-domain socket to which ">file" would write. It might even be plausible to have someone run m-x shell in emacs, find the tty, and put that into .write-forward so that the messages would get to them. I may just implement this in my "copious free time" but thought I'd suggest it to see if it was deemed reasonable (particularly for dialup use.) _Mark_ ps. Historical note - "write user@machine" (ie. the "writed" concept) was apparently written by Bill Sommerfeld back in 1985 - it's a local MIT hack, though user-to-user write on a single host is actually part of BSD.