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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 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 previous state.

     Permission to talk may be denied or granted by use of the mesg(1) command.  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 rea-sons). reasons).
     sons).

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

     Multibyte characters are not recognized.

BSD                                            August 21, 2008                                           BSD