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’.

     When first called, talk 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 the user you wish to talk to. At this point, the recipient of the message should reply 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, with
     their output appearing in separate windows.  Typing control-L ‘^L’ will cause the screen to
     be reprinted, while your erase, kill, and word kill characters will behave normally.  To
     exit, just type your interrupt character; talk then moves the cursor to the bottom of the
     screen and restores the terminal to its previous state.

     Permission to talk may be denied or granted by use of the mesg(1) command.  At the outset
     talking is allowed.  Certain commands, in particular nroff(1) and pr(1), disallow messages
     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)

BUGS

     The version of talk(1) released with 4.3BSD uses a protocol that is incompatible with the
     protocol used in the version released with 4.2BSD.

HISTORY

     The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD.