xenial (1) netkit-ntalk.1.gz

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.