1TALK(1) BSD General Commands Manual TALK(1)
2
4 talk — talk to another user
5
7 talk person [ttyname]
8
10 Talk is a visual communication program which copies lines from your ter‐
11 minal to that of another user.
12 Options available:
14 person If you wish to talk to someone on your own machine, then person
16 is just the person's login name. If you wish to talk to a user
17 on another host, then person is of the form ‘user@host’.
18 ttyname If you wish to talk to a user who is logged in more than once,
20 the ttyname argument may be used to indicate the appropriate
21 terminal name, where ttyname is of the form ‘ttyXX’ or ‘pts/X’.
22 When first called, talk contacts the talk daemon on the other user's
24 machine, which sends the message
25 Message from TalkDaemon@his_machine...
26 talk: connection requested by your_name@your_machine.
27 talk: respond with: talk your_name@your_machine
28 to that user. At this point, he then replies by typing
30 talk your_name@your_machine
32 It doesn't matter from which machine the recipient replies, as long as
34 his login name is the same. Once communication is established, the two
35 parties may type simultaneously; their output will appear in separate
36 windows. Typing control-L (^L) will cause the screen to be reprinted.
37 The erase, kill line, and word erase characters (normally ^H, ^U, and ^W
38 respectively) will behave normally. To exit, just type the interrupt
39 character (normally ^C); talk then moves the cursor to the bottom of the
40 screen and restores the terminal to its previous state.
41 As of netkit-ntalk 0.15 talk supports scrollback; use esc-p and esc-n to
43 scroll your window, and ctrl-p and ctrl-n to scroll the other window.
44 These keys are now opposite from the way they were in 0.16; while this
45 will probably be confusing at first, the rationale is that the key combi‐
46 nations with escape are harder to type and should therefore be used to
47 scroll one's own screen, since one needs to do that much less often.
48 If you do not want to receive talk requests, you may block them using the
50 mesg(1) command. By default, talk requests are normally not blocked.
51 Certain commands, in particular nroff(1), pine(1), and pr(1), may block
52 messages temporarily in order to prevent messy output.
53
55 /etc/hosts to find the recipient's machine
56 /var/run/utmp to find the recipient's tty
57
59 mail(1), mesg(1), who(1), write(1), talkd(8)
60
62 The protocol used to communicate with the talk daemon is braindead.
63 Also, the version of talk(1) released with 4.2BSD uses a different and
65 even more braindead protocol that is completely incompatible. Some vendor
66 Unixes (particularly those from Sun) have been found to use this old pro‐
67 tocol.
68 Old versions of talk may have trouble running on machines with more than
70 one IP address, such as machines with dynamic SLIP or PPP connections.
71 This problem is fixed as of netkit-ntalk 0.11, but may affect people you
72 are trying to communicate with.
73
75 The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD.
76Linux NetKit (0.17) November 24, 1999 Linux NetKit (0.17)