talk uname [ttyname
A visual communication program which copies lines from your terminal to that of another user.
To talk to a user on another host, uname
is of the form user@host
.
To talk to a user who is logged in more than once, ttyname
use 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:
to that user. At this point, he then replies by typingMessage from TalkDaemon@his_machine... talk: connection requested by your_name@your_machine. talk: respond with: talk your_name@your_machine
talk your_name@your_machine
It doesn't matter from which machine the recipient replies, as long as his login name is the
same.
netkit-ntalk 0.15 talk supports scrollback; use ␛p and ␛n to scroll your window,
and ctrl-p and ctrl-n to scroll the other window.
To block talk requests use
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.
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.
Linux NetKit (0.17)
Once communication is established, the two parties may type simultaneously; their output will appear in separate windows.
The erase, kill line, and word erase characters (normally ^H, ^U, and ^W ) behave normally.
To exit, 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.
mesg n
. By default, talk requests are normally not blocked.
Certain commands, nroff, pine, and pr,
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, who, write(1), talkd
BUGS
The protocol used to communicate with the talk daemon is braindead.