talk — talk to another user

       The protocol used to communicate with the talk daemon is braindead.

       Also, the version of talk(1) released with 4.2BSD uses a different and even more braindead protocol  that
       is  completely incompatible. Some vendor Unixes (particularly those from Sun) have been found to use this
       old protocol. There's a patch from Juan-Mariano de Goyeneche (jmseyas@dit.upm.es) which makes talk/talkd,
       if compiled with -DSUN_HACK, compatible with SunOS/Solaris' ones. It converts messages from one  protocol
       to the other.

       Old versions of talk may have trouble running on machines with more than one IP address, such as machines
       with  dynamic  SLIP  or  PPP  connections.  This problem is fixed as of netkit-ntalk 0.11, but may affect
       people you are trying to communicate with.

Talk 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’.

       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’ or ‘pts/X’.

       When first called, talk contacts the talk daemon on the other user's machine, which 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 that user. At this point, he then replies by typing

             talkyour_name@your_machine

       It doesn't 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; their output will appear in
       separate windows.  Typing control-L (^L) will cause the screen to be reprinted. The erase, kill line, and
       word erase characters (normally ^H, ^U, and ^W respectively) will behave normally.  To  exit,  just  type
       the  interrupt  character  (normally  ^C);  talk  then  moves  the cursor to the bottom of the screen and
       restores the terminal to its previous state.

       As of netkit-ntalk 0.15 talk supports scrollback; use esc-p and esc-n to scroll your window,  and  ctrl-p
       and  ctrl-n to scroll the other window. These keys are now opposite from the way they were in 0.16; while
       this will probably be confusing at first, the rationale is that the  key  combinations  with  escape  are
       harder  to  type and should therefore be used to scroll one's own screen, since one needs to do that much
       less often.

       If you do not want to receive talk requests, you may block them using the mesg(1) command.   By  default,
       talk  requests  are  normally not blocked.  Certain commands, in particular nroff(1), pine(1), and pr(1),
       may block messages temporarily in order to prevent messy output.

/etc/hosts     to find the recipient's machine
       /var/run/utmp  to find the recipient's tty

       The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD.

Linux NetKit (0.17)                             November 24, 1999                                        TALK(1)

       talk — talk to another user

mail(1), mesg(1), who(1), write(1), talkd(8)

talkperson [ttyname]