Ever been annoyed at how "write" only works on the local machine? Well here's the answer! "msend" uses a special protocol to do the equivalent of "write" over networks. Features in version 3.3: o Supports OpenStep (tested under OPENSTEP for Mach and Rhapsody DR1). o FWIW, os 1.0 was a NEXTSTEP / little foundation port I did ages ago. This isn't great code: I'm not AppKit whiz (I spend my time writing other sorts of programs!). o Everything gets installed into /LocalApps/msend.app. The "msend" binary is a graphical frontend to msend. "write" is the original command line tool. "mesgd" uses "malert" to popup an alert panel. o Here's the magic for rc.local: if [ -x /LocalApps/msend.app/mesgd ]; then /LocalApps/msend.app/mesgd & fi o Thanks to Dan Grillo <dan_grillo@280.com> for the iconic inspiration. Features in version 2.1: o Multi-line messages to minimise the annoyance value of long messages o Messages sent to users who aren't logged on are saved for their next login o Messages can be broadcast over a local network o Messages can be sent to user, tty, console, or "wall"ed o Recent messages can be recalled in case you missed them o Message transfers using TCP or UDP o Unlimited-size TCP messages o Can be used for text file transfers o Supports GNU readline for nice line editing This release has had a fair amount of work done on portability. As well as being ported to a number of platforms some effort has been taken to ease porting to new platforms. See the INSTALL file for directions. Credits: Geoff Arnold from Sun for the original implementation Andrew Herbert for message acknowledgements and line reading Zik Saleeba for bugfixes, message saving, removal of redundancies, removal of static limits, man page, install instructions, portability work, ANSI conformance and general polishing David Barr for a couple of ideas from a divergent implementation Luke Howard for the OPENSTEP port. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This is an improved version of the original RFC1312 Message Send Protocol server and client. These programs support a superset of the standard as specified in the RFC. The server is now capable of handling TCP messages of any length and UDP messages up to 64k. The "signature" section, originally intended for security verification, has been used to add a "tagline" from a .msgsig file. Only one line of this is used however - the space after a CR/LF pair is reserved for future security verification should anyone ever implement this. Here's the original post: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: geoff@tyger.East.Sun.COM (Geoff Arnold @ Sun BOS) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc,comp.sources.unix Subject: Message Send Protocol 2 - Unix sources Date: 27 May 1992 22:36:11 GMT Organization: Sun Microsystems PC-NFS Engineering Lines: 1492 Distribution: net Message-ID: <1012srINNp6c@seven-up.East.Sun.COM> Reply-To: geoff@east.sun.com NNTP-Posting-Host: tyger.east.sun.com Here are the sources to the Unix client and server for the RFC1312 Message Send Protocol. I apologize profusely for my tardiness in posting them: no excuses... The sources are essentially the same as we ship with PC-NFS 4.0, and work with the DOS components included with that release. They haven't been widely ported so far, and right now I'm having fun getting these (and pcnfsd v2) running on BSD/386. (If anyone can see anything non-portable in my code in msgclnt.c for finding all broadcastable interfaces, please let me know - it works on Sun's, but not on BSD/386.) Cheers Geoff
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.
