Hey(1)

NAME
hey - send a message to another user

SYNOPSIS
hey [ options ] user[.ttyname ] user ...

DESCRIPTION
Hey allows you to communicate with other users, by copying messages from your terminal to theirs.

You type the command: hey username and press enter. The message should then be entered. When you are finished typing the message, press Ctrl-D. The message will appear as follows.

    Message from you@yourhost on yourtty at hh:mm ...
        oooooooooooooooooooooo
        O Message Text O
        oooooooooooooooooooooo

If the message contains any long lines word wrapping will be applied.

If the other user wants to reply, they must run Hey as well.

You can prevent people (other than the super-user) from writing to you with the mesg(1) command. Some commands, for example nroff(1) and pr(1), may disallow heying automatically, so that your output isn't overwritten.

If the user you want to hey to is logged in on to more than one terminal, you can specify which terminal to hey to by specifying the terminal name.

    hey username.ttyname

Alternatively you can allow hey to select one of the terminals - it will pick the one with the shortest idle time. This is so that if the user is logged in at work and also dialed up from home, the message will go to the right place.

OPTIONS

-w "<number>"
    Word wrap after <number> characters. <number> must be between 10 and 70, or hey will wrap after seventy.

-t "<title>"
    Centers the string <title> in title bar of message, so long as <title> is not more than 70 characters.

-m  Ignore potentially annoying mesg n warnings.

-h  Display hey help

-c  Display hey credits.

-b "<borderstring>"
    Used to define the border used for the message. <borderstring> is a nine character string. The first character defines the default border character. All spaces later in the string will be replaced by this character.
    The next four characters contain the top, bottom, left and right of the box. These characters will be filled by the default character if the string is less than 5 characters long.
    The next four characters define the characters for the top-left, top-right, bottom-left and bottom-right of the box. If the string is five characters long these will be filled by the default character. If the string is six, seven or eight characters long the character for the top-left corner will be used to fill the remaining corners. (Spaces here still become the default character.

-s "<success_message>"
    If you are pedantic about the exit message you can change it from the default: "groovy" by setting this command line argument.

-e "<eofstring>"
    Used instead of the traditional unix EOF, to indicate end of file, ie. when you are finished entering a hey. e.g. if eofstring is "." if you enter a "." on its own line in hey, hey will consider that the end of the hey and send it accordingly.

-n "<maxnames>"
    Used to set the maximum number of usernames displayed as part of the prompt.

-p "<prompt_string>"
    Used to set the hey prompt. The prompt is useful to let you know who you are heying. Any occurance of the string %u is replaced with a list of the people you are heying. If you are heying more than <maxnames> people, the string "..." will be shown to denote more users. This is to stop the prompt becoming unwieldly if you are sending a hey to a large number of users. Any occurance of the string %n is replaced with the number of users you are heying. %% is replaced by a literal "%".

ENVIROMENT VARIABLES
These enviroment variables allow you to set default values for the above options. The effects of all these variables are overridden if the appropriate command line option is used.

HEY_TITLE
    Sets the default title.

HEY_BORDERS
    Sets default border string.

HEY_WRAP
    Sets default width at which to word wrap.

HEY_SUCCESS
    Sets the default success message.

HEY_EOF
    Sets a replacement string to use as EOF.

HEY_PROMPT
    Sets the hey prompt string

HEY_MAXNAMES
    Sets the maximum number of usernames to include as part of the prompt string

READLINE FUNCTIONS
if c-hey was compiled with readline it will define the following functions for you to bind to in your inputrc :

hey_line_up
    Move <arg> lines up, <arg> is the readline numberic argument (defaults to 1)

hey_line_down
    Move <arg> lines down, <arg> is the readline numberic argument (defaults to 1)

hey_carriage_return
    A replacement carriage return handler, bound to '\r' by default

hey_refresh
    refresh the hey "canvas", bound to ctrl-l by default

hey_arrows
    handle the arrow keys, bount to "\[" and "\O" by default

SEE ALSO
mesg(1), talk(1), who(1), write(1), readline(info)

CREDITS
The C version of hey is by
    Cian Synnott <pooka@redbrick.dcu.ie>
For a history of hey, check out the 'history' file that comes with the distribution of c-hey. The dist is available at
    http://c-hey.redbrick.dcu.ie/