Description of problem: Something changed in gnome-terminal or vte last year (I think) and write between specific pts's stopped working: i.e. write trevor pts/44 write: trevor is not logged in on pts/9 Also, "who" doesn't show any gnome-terminal pts, it doesn't show anything at all for g-t, not even 1 entry for gnome-terminal. This is less important for me but might be indicative of the underlying problem. If you open xterms instead, they all show up in who, one entry per pts, which is what you'd expect. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-terminal-3.20.3-1.fc24.x86_64 vte-0.28.2-17.fc24.x86_64 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. open 1 gnome-terminals (or 2 if you want a realistic example) 2. run "tty" 3. "write <your-login-name> <pts/XX-as-above>" Actual results: write: trevor is not logged in on pts/44 Expected results: no error, can input text to write to the terminal Additional info: This worked for many many years (like 5-10+) up until I'm guessing last year (I didn't note the time because even though I use the feature a ton, I can work around it).
See also bug 1328947. In short, [uw]tmp/lastlog logging is not supported anymore by gnome-terminal, so this is WONTFIX at least as far as upstream is concerned.
<Face plant> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747046 So they didn't realize that code is what allowed write to work (and probably many other things that no one has thought of yet). Ya, good "win" taking out 2200 lines of code they don't understand/like "just because". So now write is broken in Fedora with gnome-terminal. Should I file a bug against write? But it gets worse: I can understand the super-specific write trevor pts/9 not working, but also just "write trevor" does not work when only gnome-terminals are open: >write trevor write: trevor has messages disabled >mesg is y ??? That's broken. Open just one xterm and then you can write once again (no "has messages disabled" error) but the write only shows up on the xterm (not in any g-t's). Argh... even worse: "wall" gives no error and writes no output to any gnome-terminal! So you think you've walled something when in fact you've communicated to no one. So much for notifying users of impending reboots. Can anyone name one other (non-vte) terminal that (mis)behaves in this manner? Is there any workaround I can use to write text to these pts without using "write" now that g-t devs have unilaterally decided the age-old extremely useful write/wall tools are unimportant?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1280724 ***
(In reply to Trevor Cordes from comment #2) > Can anyone name one other (non-vte) terminal that (mis)behaves in this > manner? Konsole?
Nope, Konsole functions completely sanely with regard to write/who/wall. Looks like only gnome-terminal has gone down the path of insanity. https://muug.ca/pipermail/roundtable/2017-July/005010.html In fact, it looks like Konsole will make a fine replacement for g-t.
(In reply to Trevor Cordes from comment #2) > Is there any workaround I can use to write text to these pts without using > "write" now that g-t devs have unilaterally decided the age-old extremely > useful write/wall tools are unimportant? It seems you can `echo "test" > /dev/pts/44`
(In reply to Trevor Cordes from comment #2) > Can anyone name one other (non-vte) terminal that (mis)behaves in this > manner? E.g. terminology (enlightenment) and st (suckless) have no utmp logging at all.