TALK(1) | General Commands Manual | TALK(1) |
NAME¶
talk
— talk to
another user
SYNOPSIS¶
talk |
person [-x] [ttyname] |
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
’ ( or ‘host.user
’ or ‘host!user
’ or ‘host:user
’ ). - -x
- If you wish to talk to a user who has dot character in username, the
-x argument will force
‘
user@host
’ form of the person and talk will take dots as part of user name. - 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¶
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.
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.
November 24, 1999 | Linux NetKit (0.17) |