talk(1) — USER COMMANDS

NAME

talk − talk to another user

SYNOPSIS

talk username [ ttyname ]

DESCRIPTION

talk is a visual communication program that copies lines from your terminal to that of a user on the same or on another host. If you wish to talk to someone on you own machine, then username is that user’s login name. If you wish to talk to a user on another host, then person is of the form user@host .

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, talk sends the message:

Message from TalkDaemon@her_machine at time ...
talk: connection requested by your_name@your_machine
talk: respond with: talk your_name@your_machine

to the user you want to talk to. At this point, the recipient of the message should reply by typing:

talk your_name@your_machine

It does not matter from which machine the recipient replies, as long as the login name is the same. Once communication is established, the two parties may type simultaneously, with their output appearing in separate windows. Typing CTRL-l redraws the screen, while your erase, kill, and word kill characters will work in talk as normal. In addition, CTRL-w is defined as a word-kill character. To exit, just type your interrupt character; talk then moves the cursor to the bottom of the screen and restores the terminal to its previous state.

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

FILES

/etc/hosts to find the recipient’s machine

/var/adm/utmp to find the recipient’s tty

CAVEATS

The version of talk(1) released with System V/88 uses a protocol that is incompatible with the protocol used in the version released with 4.2BSD. The new protocol is compatible with 4.3BSD. The older protocol was not portable across different machine architectures.

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