TALK(1) User Commands TALK(1)

NAME

talk - talk to another user

SYNOPSIS

talk address [terminal]

DESCRIPTION

The talk utility is a two-way, screen-oriented communication program.


When first invoked, talk sends a message similar to:

Message from TalkDaemon@ her_machine at time ...
talk: connection requested by your_address
talk: respond with: talk your_address


to the specified address. At this point, the recipient of the message
can reply by typing:

talk your_address


Once communication is established, the two parties can type
simultaneously, with their output displayed in separate regions of
the screen. Characters are processed as follows:

o Typing the alert character will alert the recipient's
terminal.

o Typing Control-L will cause the sender's screen regions to
be refreshed.

o Typing the erase and kill characters will affect the
sender's terminal in the manner described by the
termios(3C) interface.

o Typing the interrupt or end-of-file (EOF) characters will
terminate the local talk utility. Once the talk session
has been terminated on one side, the other side of the
talk session will be notified that the talk session has
been terminated and will be able to do nothing except
exit.

o Typing characters from LC_CTYPE classifications print or
space will cause those characters to be sent to the
recipient's terminal.

o When and only when the stty iexten local mode is enabled,
additional special control characters and multi-byte or
single-byte characters are processed as printable
characters if their wide character equivalents are
printable.

o Typing other non-printable characters will cause them to
be written to the recipient's terminal as follows: control
characters will appear as a caret (^) followed by the
appropriate ASCII character, and characters with the high-
order bit set will appear in "meta" notation. For example,
`\003' is displayed as `^C' and `\372' as `M-z'.


Permission to be a recipient of a talk message can be denied or
granted by use of the mesg(1) utility. However, a user's privilege
may further constrain the domain of accessibility of other users'
terminals. Certain commands, such as pr(1), disallow messages in
order to prevent interference with their output. talk will fail when
the user lacks the appropriate privileges to perform the requested
action.


Certain block-mode terminals do not have all the capabilities
necessary to support the simultaneous exchange of messages required
for talk. When this type of exchange cannot be supported on such
terminals, the implementation may support an exchange with reduced
levels of simultaneous interaction or it may report an error
describing the terminal-related deficiency.

OPERANDS

The following operands are supported:

address
The recipient of the talk session. One form of address is
the username, as returned by the who(1) utility. If you
wish to talk to someone on your own machine, then
username is just the person's login name. If you wish to
talk to a user on another host, then username is one of
the following forms:

host!user
host.user
host:user
user@host


although user@host is perhaps preferred.


terminal
If the recipient is logged in more than once, terminal
can be used to indicate the appropriate terminal name. If
terminal is not specified, the talk message will be
displayed on one or more accessible terminals in use by
the recipient. The format of terminal will be the same as
that returned by who.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

See environ(7) for descriptions of the following environment
variables that affect the execution of talk: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE,
LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.

TERM
Determine the name of the invoker's terminal type. If this
variable is unset or null, an unspecified terminal type will
be used.

EXIT STATUS

The following exit values are returned:

0
Successful completion.


>0
An error occurred, or talk was invoked on a terminal incapable
of supporting it.

FILES

/etc/hosts
host name database


/var/adm/utmpx
user and accounting information for talk

ATTRIBUTES

See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:


+--------------------+-----------------+
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
+--------------------+-----------------+
|Interface Stability | Standard |
+--------------------+-----------------+

SEE ALSO

mail(1), mesg(1), pr(1), stty(1), who(1), write(1), termios(3C),
attributes(7), environ(7), standards(7)

NOTES

Typing Control-L redraws the screen, while the erase, kill, and word
kill characters will work in talk as normal. To exit, type an
interrupt character. talk then moves the cursor to the bottom of the
screen and restores the terminal to its previous state.

November 6, 2000 TALK(1)