talk - Unix, Linux Command
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.
Options available:
Tag | Description |
person
|
If you wish to talk to someone on your own machine, then
person
is just the persons 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 users 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 doesnt 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 ones
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
Tag | Description |
/etc/hosts
|
to find the recipients machine
|
/var/run/utmp
| |
to find the recipients tty
|
SEE ALSO
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
BSD 4.2
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
BSD 4.2 .
|