# $EPIC: mesg,v 1.4 2001/06/04 22:53:37 jnelson Exp $
Synopsis:
   mesg		[display the current terminal writability state]
   mesg yes		[make your terminal world-writeable]
   mesg no		[make your terminal not world-writeable]

Description:
   This command simulates the effect of the unix mesg(1) command.
   When you specify the 'yes' flag, other users on your system may write
   messages directly to your terminal, which will mess up your ircII screen.
   If you specify the 'no' flag, other users will be prohibited from writing
   to your terminal.  If you do not specify an argument, the current value 
   is used.

   This operation is permanent and transcends EPIC; when you exit EPIC the
   value you set here will persist until you log out.

   Back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and everybody on the
   internet was using a unix shell account, the 'talk' program was very
   popular and was used to talk to other users on other machines who were
   not using irc.  Eventually some yutz on irc figured out that you could
   corrupt a victim's terminal emulator making it impossible to see anything
   by forging talk requests and inserting specially crafted data into it.

   If your unix host runs the talk daemon, you should /MESG no to avoid
   being the victim of a "talk bomb".  You really should turn off the talk
   daemon since "talk bombs" are about the only thing they're used for these
   days.  If your unix host is not running 'talk' then it really doesn't
   matter what your MESG setting is.

   Because write-access control to your terminal is controlled entirely 
   through ordinary unix file permissions, users that are not subject to
   ordinary unix file permissions (ie, root) can never be prohibited from 
   writing to your terminal.  This is not a bug in epic, this is how unix 
   works.
