TALK(1) - General Commands Manual #
TALK(1) - General Commands Manual
NAME #
talk - talk to another user
SYNOPSIS #
talk [-Hs] person [ttyname]
DESCRIPTION #
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.
ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS #
SIGINT
Terminate
**talk**
and exit with a zero status.
FILES #
/etc/hosts
to find the recipient's machine
/var/run/utmp
to find the recipient's tty
EXIT STATUS #
The talk utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if either an error occurred or talk is invoked on an unsupported terminal.
SEE ALSO #
mail(1), mesg(1), who(1), write(1), talkd(8)
STANDARDS #
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.
HISTORY #
The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD.
OpenBSD 7.5 - May 25, 2017