talk(1) User Commands talk(1)NAMEtalk - talk to another user
SYNOPSIStalk 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 simultane‐
ously, 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 termi‐
nal.
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 ses‐
sion will be notified that the talk session has been termi‐
nated 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 recipi‐
ent's terminal.
o When and only when the stty iexten local mode is enabled,
additional special control characters and multi-byte or sin‐
gle-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 appro‐
priate 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. Cer‐
tain 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 capabilities necessary
to support the simultaneous exchange of messages required for talk.
When this type of exchange cannot be supported on such terminals, the
implementation may support an exchange with reduced levels of simulta‐
neous 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 ter‐
minal is not specified, the talk message will be displayed
on one or more accessible terminals in use by the recipi‐
ent. 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 terminal incapable of
supporting it.
FILES
/etc/hosts host name database
/var/adm/utmpx user and accounting information for talkATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
┌─────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┐
│ ATTRIBUTE TYPE │ ATTRIBUTE VALUE │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Availability │SUNWrcmds │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Interface Stability │Standard │
└─────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┘
SEE ALSOmail(1), mesg(1), pr(1), stty(1), who(1), write(1), talkd(1M),
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 cursor to the bottom of the screen and
restores the terminal to its previous state.
SunOS 5.10 15 Nov 2011 talk(1)
