TALK(1)                              BSD                               TALK(1)



NAME
     talk - talk to another user

SYNOPSIS
     talk person [ttyname]

DESCRIPTION
     talk is a visual communication program that copies lines from your
     terminal to that of another user.

     If you wish to talk to someone on your own machine, then person is just
     the person's log-in name. If you wish to talk to a user on another host,
     then person is of the form

                         host!user  or
                         host.user  or
                         host:user  or
                         user@host

     The form user@host is preferred.

     If you want to talk to a user who is logged in more than once, use the
     ttyname argument to indicate the appropriate terminal name.

     When first called, talk sends the following message to the user you wish
     to talk to:

          Message from TalkDaemon@his_machine...
          talk: connection requested by your_name@your_machine.
          talk: respond with: talk your_name@your_machine

     At this point, the recipient of the message should reply by typing

          talk  your_name@your_machine

     It doesn't matter from which machine the recipient replies, as long as
     his log-in name is the same.  Once communication is established, the two
     parties may type simultaneously, with their output appearing in separate
     windows. Typing CTRL/L causes the window to be reprinted, while your
     erase, kill, and word kill characters will work normally in talk.  To
     exit, type your interrupt character; talk then moves the cursor to the
     bottom of the screen and restores the terminal.

     Permission to talk may be denied or granted by use of the mesg(1)
     command.  At the outset talking is allowed.  Certain commands, in
     particular nroff(1) and pr(1), disallow messages in order to prevent
     messy output.

     For a node to accept incoming talk commands from remote machines, it must
     be correctly configured to run TCP/IP.  See Configuring and Managing
     TCP/IP for information on configuring TCP/IP.



BUGS
     The version of talk(1) released with 4.3BSD uses a protocol that is
     incompatible with the protocol used in the version released with 4.2BSD.

FILES
     /etc/hosts     to find the recipient's machine
     /etc/utmp      to find the recipient's tty

SEE ALSO
     mesg(1), who(1), mail(1), write(1)