NAME
talk —
talk to another user
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
talk is a visual communication program which copies lines from
your terminal to that of another user.
Options available:
-
-
- person
- 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
’.
-
-
- ttyname
- If you wish 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;
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, in particular
nroff(1) and
pr(1), disallow messages in order to
prevent messy output.
ENVIRONMENT
If the
TALKHOST
environment variable is set, its value
is used as the
hostname the
talk
packets appear to be originating from. This is useful if you wish to talk to
someone on another machine and your internal hostname does not resolve to the
address of your external interface as seen from the other machine.
FILES
- /etc/hosts
- to find the recipient's machine
- /var/run/utmp
- to find the recipient's tty
SEE ALSO
mail(1),
mesg(1),
who(1),
write(1)
HISTORY
The
talk command appeared in
4.2BSD.
BUGS
The version of
talk released with
4.3BSD uses a protocol that is incompatible with the
protocol used in the version released with
4.2BSD.