TALK(1)

💬 TALK(1) — the general commands manual, but make it a group chat 💬

okay bestie, sit down, we're learning talk today. it lives in section 1 of the General Commands Manual, and it's literally just "talk to another user." that's the whole vibe. ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

talk — talk to another user 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

talk person [ttyname]

that's it. that's the whole invocation. two little slots and you're yapping. 💅

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so. talk is a visual communication program which copies lines from your terminal to that of another user. it's giving... typing at someone in real time but the terminal is doing the heavy lifting. iconic behavior honestly. 🎀

Options available:

• person — if you wanna talk to someone on your own machine, then person is just the person's login name. easy. but if you wanna talk to a user on another host, then person is of the form user@host. boom. that's the whole thing. 🌈
• ttyname — if the person you're trying to reach is logged in more than once, you can use the ttyname argument to point at the right terminal, where ttyname is of the form ttyXX or pts/X. so like. pick your fighter. 💅

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📞 how the actual conversation starts 📞

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

talk  your_name@your_machine

and honestly? that's the moment. that's the connection request coming through. 🦋

It doesn't matter from which machine the recipient replies, as long as his login name is the same. lowkey forgiving of it, we love that.

Once communication is established, the two parties may type simultaneously; their output will appear in separate windows. two main characters, one screen. periodt. 👑

• 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. no surprises, we love a stable vibe. 💜

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. clean exit, no mess left behind. 🧚

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📜 scrollback lore (netkit-ntalk 0.15 girlies rise) 📜

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. so like. trust the process. 😭

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🙈 not wanting the yap 🙈

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. protective of their formatting, as they should be. 💅

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🗂️ FILES 🗂️

• /etc/hosts — to find the recipient's machine 🌍
• /var/run/utmp — to find the recipient's tty 🖥️

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

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

go read the girlies. iykyk. 🫶

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💀 BUGS 💀

The protocol used to communicate with the talk daemon is braindead. not my words. well. they are my words now, but they were the manpage's words first.

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. a whole translator arc, we respect it. 🌈

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. so like. it's not you, it's their version. 😭

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📚 HISTORY 📚

The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD. a true elder. 👑

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and that's the whole page bestie — this was Linux NetKit (0.17), dated November 24, 1999, and honestly the talk page ate. now go yap at somebody. 💖✨