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

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 respec-
     tively) 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.

     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.

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