Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)

FreeBSD Manual Pages

  
 
  

home | help
TALK(1) 		     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 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 mes-
     sage should reply by typing

	   talk  your_name@your_machine

     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 con-
     trol-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 previ-
     ous 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/utx.active  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))  re-
     solved  to a valid IPv4 address (via gethostbyname(3)), making talk unsuit-
     able for use in configurations where talkd(8) was bound to the loopback in-
     terface (normally for security reasons).

BUGS
     The version of talk released with 4.3BSD uses a protocol that is incompati-
     ble with the protocol used in the version released with 4.2BSD.

     Multibyte characters are not recognized.

FreeBSD ports 15.quarterly	January 21, 2010			 TALK(1)

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=talk&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+15.1-RELEASE+and+Ports.quarterly>

home | help