talk - talk to another user

This command is only available to users accessing the POSIX shell via rlogin.

talk enables you to communicate with another user working at a terminal on the same or a different host. talk copies input lines from your terminal to the recipient’s terminal. talk is architecture dependent; it works only between machines that have the same architecture.

Syntax

talk loginname[ ttyname]

loginname

Login name of the user you want to communicate with. If this user is logged in more than once, the ttyname argument may be used to indicate the appropriate terminal.

If the user is working on another system, you have to enter:

loginname@systemname 

ttyname

Name of the terminal on which the user with whom you want to talk is working. You need only enter ttyname if the recipient loginname is logged in more than once. The who command enables you to see which terminals loginname is logged in on.

Functionality

In a talk conversation, there is an originator and a recipient. The user who calls talk is the originator, while the user whose login name is specified is the recipient.

When the originator calls talk, the following appears on the recipient’s terminal:

Message from TalkDaemon@target_system at time
talk: connection requested by originator@source_system
talk: respond with: talk originator@source_system

and the following on the originator’s:

Waiting for your party to respond

This is on condition that the recipient’s login name is defined, the recipient is logged in and the connection could be set up successfully.

At this point, the recipient can accept the call by entering:

talk originator@source_system

The screens of the originator and the recipient then divide into two windows, the upper for writing messages, the lower for reading messages. Both parties can read and write messages simultaneously.

To refuse a call, the recipient presses CTRL+C, at which point the shell prompt appears and the user can continue working normally.

Once communication is established, during conversation

• printable characters are passed through to the other party

• the bell character is passed thtough to the other party

• you can redraw the screen with CTRL+L,

• you can terminate communication by pressing CTRL+C. The message

  Connection closing. Exiting

  is output and the shell prompt appears at the bottom of the screen, followed by the cursor.

You can use the mesg command to grant (mesg -y) or deny (mesg -n) other users permission to set up a communication connection to your terminal with talk. The default setting for mesg is y. Certain commands, such as pr, automatically disallow messages in order to prevent messy output.

Error

No connection yet

The connection with the recipient could not be set up yet. It is advisable to wait a while, and then try again if the message Waiting for your party to respond does not appear on your screen after a few seconds.

Your party is not logged on

The login name you specified as recipient is not defined, or the user is currently not logged in.

Your party is refusing messages

Permission to write messages to the recipient’s terminal is denied (see mesg).

File

/etc/hosts

This file is required to locate the recipient’s system.

/var/adm/utmp

This file is required to locate the recipient’s terminal. All users who are logged in are recorded in this file.

Locale

The following environment variables affect the execution of talk:

LANG

Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. If LANG is unset of null, the corresponding value from the implementation-specific default locale will be used. If any of the internationalization variables contains an invalid setting, the utility will behave as if none of the variables had been defined.

LC_ALL

If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.

LC_CTYPE

Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single- as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments and input files), the classification of characters as upper- to lower-case, and the mapping of characters from one case to the other.

LC_MESSAGES

Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.

NLSPATH

Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES.

Example 1

You want to communicate with the user walter who is working on the same system as you:

$ talk walter

...

Example 2

You want to communicate with the user lindsay who is working at terminal tty003 on the system munich:

$ talk lindsay@munich tty003

...

See also

mailx, mesg, pr, who, write