Package: bsdmainutils Version: 9.0.6 Followup-For: Bug #743215 I'm not sure I follow. Does write actually need uid/euid for anything more than determing the sender of the message?
The recipient is already specified manually. Talk (or was it ntalk?) display simply "*unknown user*" when the username of the sender cannot be identified unambiguosly, and that would be absolutely fine. I generally wanted to (and use) "write" for opportunistic notification of batch events. write shouldn't fail for such petty reasons, since I could just spam all TTYs manually in any case. Just write the PID/uid if the username is bogus.
