TALK(1) BSD General Commands Manual TALK(1)NAMEtalk — talk to another user
SYNOPSIStalk person [ttyname]
DESCRIPTIONtalk is a visual communication program which copies lines from your ter‐
minal 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’.
When first called, talk 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 the user you wish to talk to. At this point, the recipient of the
message should reply 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, with their output appearing in separate
windows. Typing control-L ‘^L’ will cause the screen to be reprinted,
while your erase, kill, and word kill characters will behave normally.
To exit, just type your interrupt character; talk then moves the cursor
to the bottom of the screen and restores the terminal to its previous
state.
Permission to talk may be denied or granted by use of the mesg(1) com‐
mand. At the outset talking is allowed. Certain commands, in particular
nroff(1) and pr(1), disallow messages in order to prevent messy output.
ENVIRONMENT
If the TALKHOST environment variable is set, its value is used as the
hostname the talk packets appear to be originating from. This is useful
if you wish to talk to someone on another machine and your internal host‐
name does not resolve to the address of your external interface as seen
from the other machine.
FILES
/etc/hosts to find the recipient's machine
/var/run/utmp to find the recipient's tty
SEE ALSOmail(1), mesg(1), who(1), write(1)HISTORY
The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD.
BUGS
The version of talk released with 4.3BSD uses a protocol that is incom‐
patible with the protocol used in the version released with 4.2BSD.
BSD January 7, 2007 BSD
