Preventing someone from writing a message to you

To prevent messages appearing on your screen while you are working, you can use the mesg command, which lets you accept or refuse messages sent to you via write. Type:

mesg n

to prevent messages from being sent to your terminal, and:

mesg y

to accept them.

To find out your current status ("y" or "n"), type mesg on its own. To find out whether other users will accept messages sent via write, type finger. The display will be something like:

   Login    Name                  TTY  Idle    When            Office
   josephh  Joseph Hulot          001          Mon 14:29
   susant   Susan Tzarcha        *002    3     Mon 14:29
   peterp   Peter Piper           003          Mon 14:29
   perry    Perry Patetic        *005          Mon 14:31

If you are using mail or vi and a message arrives that corrupts your screen, you can type <Ctrl>L to redraw the screen. See also the finger(C) and mesg(C) manual pages.