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@ hermachine at time ...
talk: connection requested by youraddress
talk: respond with: talk youraddress
to the specified address. At this point, the recipient of
the message can reply by typing:
talk youraddress
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) charac-
ters 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 LCTYPE classifications
print or space will cause those characters to be
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User Commands talk(1)
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 ASCI 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 capabili-
ties necessary to support the simultaneous exchange of mes-
sages required for talk. When this type of exchange cannot
be supported on such terminals, the implementation may sup-
port 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.
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User Commands talk(1)
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(5) for descriptions of the following environment
variables that affect the execution of talk: LANG, LCAL,
LCTYPE, LCMESAGES, 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
ATRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attri-
butes:
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User Commands talk(1)
ATRIBUTE TYPE ATRIBUTE VALUE
Availability SUNWrcmds
Interface Stability Standard
SEE ALSO
mail(1), mesg(1), pr(1), stty(1), who(1), write(1),
termios(3C), attributes(5), environ(5), standards(5)
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 cur-
sor to the bottom of the screen and restores the terminal to
its previous state.
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