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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 ses-
sion 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 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.
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 termi-
nals 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, 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 termi-
nal incapable of supporting it.
FILES
/etc/hosts host name database
/var/adm/utmpx user and accounting information for
talk
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attri-
butes:
____________________________________________________________
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE 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.