NAME

talk − talk to another user

SYNOPSIS

talk person [ ttyname ]

DESCRIPTION

talk is a visual communication program which 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 login 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

though host@user is perhaps preferred. 

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

When first called, it sends the message

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

to the user you wish to talk to. 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 login-name is the same.  Once communication is established, the two parties may type simultaneously, with their output appearing in separate windows.  Typing control L will cause the screen to be reprinted, while your erase, kill, and word kill characters will work in talk as normal.  To exit, just 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 command.  At the outset talking is allowed.  Certain commands, in particular nroff and pr(1) disallow messages in order to prevent messy output. 

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)

BUGS

The CX/UX 4.0 and later versions of talk(1C) use the 4.3BSD talk protocol.  This protocol is incompatable with the 4.2BSD version and versions in previous releases of HCX/UX.  The new protocol is better at working across machines that have different architectures.  The new talk rendezvouses at a new port, and servers for both the new port and the old port are supported. 

CX/UX Networking