TALK(1) 						    BSD General Commands Manual 						   TALK(1)

NAME

     talk -- talk to another user

SYNOPSIS

     talk person [-x] [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' ( or 'host.user' or 'host!user' or 'host:user' ).

     -x       If you wish to talk to a user who has dot character in username, the -x argument will force 'user@host' form of the person and talk
	      will take dots as part of user name.

     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 win-
     dow. 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.

     Old versions of talk may have trouble running on machines with more than one IP address, such as machines with dynamic SLIP or PPP connec-
     tions. 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.

Linux NetKit (0.17)						 November 24, 1999					       Linux NetKit (0.17)