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:

     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.