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’ or
‘pts/X’.
When first called,
talk contacts the talk daemon on the other
user's machine, which 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 that user. At this point, he then replies 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; their output will appear in separate windows. Typing control-L
(^L) will cause the screen to be reprinted. The erase, kill line, and word
erase characters (normally ^H, ^U, and ^W respectively) will behave normally.
To exit, just type the interrupt character (normally ^C);
talk then moves the cursor to the bottom of the screen and
restores the terminal to its previous state.
As of netkit-ntalk 0.15
talk supports scrollback; use esc-p
and esc-n to scroll your window, and ctrl-p and ctrl-n to scroll the other
window. These keys are now opposite from the way they were in 0.16; while this
will probably be confusing at first, the rationale is that the key
combinations with escape are harder to type and should therefore be used to
scroll one's own screen, since one needs to do that much less often.
If you do not want to receive talk requests, you may block them using the
mesg(1) command. By default, talk requests are normally not
blocked. Certain commands, in particular
nroff(1),
pine(1), and
pr(1), may block messages
temporarily in order to prevent messy output.
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),
talkd(8)
BUGS¶
The protocol used to communicate with the talk daemon is braindead.
Also, the version of
talk(1) released with
4.2BSD uses a different and even more braindead
protocol that is completely incompatible. Some vendor Unixes (particularly
those from Sun) have been found to use this old protocol. There's a patch from
Juan-Mariano de Goyeneche (jmseyas@dit.upm.es) which makes talk/talkd, if
compiled with -DSUN_HACK, compatible with SunOS/Solaris' ones. It converts
messages from one protocol to the other.
Old versions of
talk may have trouble running on machines with
more than one IP address, such as machines with dynamic SLIP or PPP
connections. This problem is fixed as of netkit-ntalk 0.11, but may affect
people you are trying to communicate with.
HISTORY¶
The
talk command appeared in
4.2BSD.
