1TALK(1) BSD General Commands Manual TALK(1)
2
4 talk — talk to another user
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7 talk person [-x] [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’ ( or
18 ‘host.user’ or ‘host!user’ or ‘host:user’ ).
19 -x If you wish to talk to a user who has dot character in username,
21 the -x argument will force ‘user@host’ form of the person and
22 talk will take dots as part of user name.
23 ttyname If you wish to talk to a user who is logged in more than once,
25 the ttyname argument may be used to indicate the appropriate
26 terminal name, where ttyname is of the form ‘ttyXX’ or ‘pts/X’.
27 When first called, talk contacts the talk daemon on the other user's
29 machine, which sends the message
30 Message from TalkDaemon@his_machine...
31 talk: connection requested by your_name@your_machine.
32 talk: respond with: talk your_name@your_machine
33 to that user. At this point, he then replies by typing
35 talk your_name@your_machine
37 It doesn't matter from which machine the recipient replies, as long as
39 his login name is the same. Once communication is established, the two
40 parties may type simultaneously; their output will appear in separate
41 windows. Typing control-L (^L) will cause the screen to be reprinted.
42 The erase, kill line, and word erase characters (normally ^H, ^U, and ^W
43 respectively) will behave normally. To exit, just type the interrupt
44 character (normally ^C); talk then moves the cursor to the bottom of the
45 screen and restores the terminal to its previous state.
46 As of netkit-ntalk 0.15 talk supports scrollback; use esc-p and esc-n to
48 scroll your window, and ctrl-p and ctrl-n to scroll the other window.
49 These keys are now opposite from the way they were in 0.16; while this
50 will probably be confusing at first, the rationale is that the key combi‐
51 nations with escape are harder to type and should therefore be used to
52 scroll one's own screen, since one needs to do that much less often.
53 If you do not want to receive talk requests, you may block them using the
55 mesg(1) command. By default, talk requests are normally not blocked.
56 Certain commands, in particular nroff(1), pine(1), and pr(1), may block
57 messages temporarily in order to prevent messy output.
58
60 /etc/hosts to find the recipient's machine
61 /var/run/utmp to find the recipient's tty
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64 mail(1), mesg(1), who(1), write(1), talkd(8)
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67 The protocol used to communicate with the talk daemon is braindead.
68 Also, the version of talk(1) released with 4.2BSD uses a different and
70 even more braindead protocol that is completely incompatible. Some vendor
71 Unixes (particularly those from Sun) have been found to use this old pro‐
72 tocol.
73 Old versions of talk may have trouble running on machines with more than
75 one IP address, such as machines with dynamic SLIP or PPP connections.
76 This problem is fixed as of netkit-ntalk 0.11, but may affect people you
77 are trying to communicate with.
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80 The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD.
81Linux NetKit (0.17) November 24, 1999 Linux NetKit (0.17)