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 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 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 charac-
     ters 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) com-
     mand.  At the outset talking is allowed.

CONFIGURATION
     The talk utility relies on the talkd system daemon.  See talkd(8) for
     information about enabling talkd.

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 reasons).

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

     Multibyte characters are not recognized.

BSD                             August 21, 2008                            BSD