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 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, talk 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 (^L) will cause the screen to be reprinted, while your erase, kill, and word kill characters will behave normally.  To exit, just type your interrupt character. 

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, disallow messages in order to prevent messy output. 

FILES

/etc/hoststo find the recipient’s machine
/etc/utmpto find the recipient’s tty

SEE ALSO

42talk(1), mail(1), mesg(1), who(1), write(1), talkd(8)

BUGS

The version of talk(1) released with 4.3BSD, as well as DYNIX(R) 3.0.17 and later, uses a protocol that is incompatible with the protocol used in earlier releases.  To talk with a 4.2BSD based system, you must use the 42talk(1) command. 

4BSD