talk —
talk to another user
talk |
[ -Hs
]
person
[ttyname ] |
talk is a visual communication program which
copies lines from your terminal to that of another user.
The command arguments are as follows:
-
-
-H- Don't escape characters with the high bit set. This may be useful for
certain character sets, but could cause erratic behaviour on some
terminals.
-
-
-s- Use smooth scrolling in the
talk
window. The default is to clear the next two rows and jump from the bottom
of the window to the top.
-
-
- 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 Talk_Daemon@localhost...
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 the login
name is the same. If the machine is not the one to which the talk request was
sent, it is noted on the screen. 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 the erase, kill, and word kill
characters will behave normally. To exit, just type the 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) command. At the outset
talking is allowed. Certain commands, such as
pr(1), disallow messages in order to
prevent messy output.
-
-
SIGINT- Terminate
talk and exit with a zero
status.
- /etc/hosts
- to find the recipient's machine
- /var/run/utmp
- to find the recipient's tty
The
talk utility exits 0 on success, and
>0 if either an error occurred or
talk
is invoked on an unsupported terminal.
mail(1),
mesg(1),
who(1),
write(1),
talkd(8)
The
talk utility is compliant with the
IEEE Std 1003.1-2008
(“POSIX.1”) specification, though its presence is
optional.
The flags [
-Hs
] are
extensions to that specification.
The
talk command appeared in
4.2BSD.
![[OpenBSD]](/openbsd.gif){kind=small}