PHONE(1) General Commands Manual PHONE(1)
NAME
phone - communicate with other users in real-time
SYNOPSIS
phone [ user@host [tty] ]
DESCRIPTION
Phone allows for two or more people to interact in a conversation across a machine or network, providing a form of conference calling.
Each participant has a window in which to type. The first line of each window is a header showing who is in the window, like:
---- root@cory on console (Commodore Cory) --------------
The login name and tty are automatically determined, and the real name is taken from the password file, which may be overridden by setting
the NAME environment variable (see csh(1) for further details.) Users may join or leave a conversation at any point in time, and the win-
dows will be automatically resized and redrawn.
USAGE
When you are being paged by another person, a message like this will appear on your screen:
Message from the Telephone_Operator@host at time ...
phone: connection requested by user@host
phone: respond with "phone user@host"
You may answer the phone simply by typing "phone", which will answer the pending call, and connect you directly.
Phone has two modes, much like the vi editor. These two modes are called conversation and command modes, and are toggled through the
escape (<esc>) and return (<ret>) keys.
When in the conversation mode, anything typed on the keyboard is sent to everyone in the current conversation. This is the default mode.
The command mode is used to execute commands, and is entered by pressing the escape key. When in this mode, phone will clear the bottom
line of the screen and print the prompt "Command>". At this point anything typed in is added to the command buffer, and will be executed
when the return key is pressed. To exit command mode without executing the acommand, press the escape key a second time.
To ivite another user to join the current conversation from within phone, enter command mode by pressing the escape key, then type
call user@host
followed by the <return> key. The user will receive a message like the one shown above if he is logged in. The host part of the name may
be omitted if the both you and the other person are on the same machine.
Phone also allows a user to execute shell commands inside his window with any keyboard input being fed to the process. The program's out-
put is sent to all users in the conversation. A shell command is executed within phone through the use of the run or ! command. An exam-
ple of this is:
run adb a.out core
to run the adb command with the arguments a.out and core. Note that tilde expansion (ie. ~user) is done by phone, but wildcarding, piping,
and i/o redirection are performed by the user's shell. It is unlikely that anyone actually cares, of course. Also, the use of visually-
oriented programs such as vi and rogue is not recommended, as this usually results in strange and unpredictable things happening. If your
terminal goes up in a puff of smoke, you were warned.
To find about the other commands available with phone, type help or ? in command mode.
You can allow or disallow phone messages to your terminal through the use of the mesg command. When you first log on, messages are
enabled.
BUGS
Csh is unhappy being fed through pipes, but it's a dumb program anyway.
The manual page is horrendous at best.
Please send any problems, questions, or suggestions to the author.
AUTHOR
Jonathan C. Broome (broome@ucb-vax.berkeley.edu)
The original user interface is borrowed from a previous program (also called phone) posted to the network in late 1984, author unknown.
FILES
/etc/hosts to find the recipient's machine
/etc/utmp to find the recipient's tty
/etc/passwd to find each user's real name
SEE ALSO
mail(1), mesg(1), talk(1), who(1), write(1)
4.2 Berkeley Distribution PHONE(1)