talk(TC)                      06 January 1993                       talk(TC)


 Name

    talk - talk to another user


 Syntax

    talk person [ ttyname ]


 Description

    talk is a visual communication program which copies lines from your ter-
    minal to that of another user.

    If you wish to talk to someone on you 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 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,
    where ttyname is of the form ``ttyXX''.

    When first called, it sends the message

       Message from TalkDaemon@hismachine...
       talk: connection requested by yourname@yourmachine.
       talk: respond with: talk yourname@yourmachine

    to the user you wish to talk to. At this point, the recipient of the mes-
    sage should reply by typing

       talk  yourname@yourmachine

    It does not 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 <Ctrl>L (^L) will cause the screen to be reprinted, while
    your erase and kill characters will behave normally.  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(C) com-
    mand.  At the outset talking is allowed.  Certain commands, in particular
    nroff and pr(C) disallow messages to prevent messy output.


 Files


    /etc/hosts
              to find the recipient's machine

    /etc/utmp to find the recipient's tty


 Notes

    The version of talk(TC) released with System V STREAMS TCP uses a proto-
    col that is incompatible with the protocol used in the version released
    with 4.2BSD.  The new protocol is compatible with 4.3BSD.  The older pro-
    tocol was not portable across different machine architectures.

    talk may be confused if you attempt to use the host.user format with a
    fully qualified hostname.

 See also

    mesg(C), who(C), mail(C), write(C), talkd(ADMN)