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TALK(1) BSD General Commands Manual TALK(1)
NAME
talk -- talk to another user
SYNOPSIS
talk person [ttyname]
DESCRIPTION
The talk utility 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'
or `host!user' or `host:user'.
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 yourname@yourmachine.
talk: respond with: talk yourname@yourmachine
to the user you wish to talk to. At this point, the recipient of the message should reply by typing
talk yourname@yourmachine
It does not 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. Typing control-D
`^D' will clear both parts of your screen to be cleared, while the control-D character will be sent to
the remote side (and just displayed by this talk client). 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) command. At the outset talking is
allowed.
FILES
/etc/hosts to find the recipient's machine
/var/run/utmpx to find the recipient's tty
SEE ALSO
mail(1), mesg(1), wall(1), who(1), write(1), talkd(8)
HISTORY
The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD.
In FreeBSD 5.3, the default behaviour of talk was changed to treat local-to-local talk requests as
originating and terminating at localhost. Before this change, it was required that the hostname (as
per gethostname(3)) resolved to a valid IPv4 address (via gethostbyname(3)), making talk unsuitable for
use in configurations where talkd(8) was bound to the loopback interface (normally for security rea-
sons).
BUGS
The version of talk released with 4.3BSD uses a protocol that is incompatible with the protocol used in
the version released with 4.2BSD.
Multibyte characters are not recognized.
BSD July 3, 2004 BSD
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