TALK(1)

💬 TALK(1) — talk to another user 💬

okay so this is the General Commands Manual page for talk(1), bestie — the OG "dm me on Unix" situation. The vibe is visual, the facts are sacred, let's go. 💅

✨ NAME ✨

talk — talk to another user 🗣️💬

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

talk [-p encoding] person [ttyname]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

talk is a visual communication program which copies lines from your terminal to that of another user. Iconic, honestly. 🫶

Options available:

• -p encoding — the charset encoding sent by your peer (i.e. UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, EUC-JP, whatever). Default is some guesswork based on the incoming data and your current locate.
• 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

talk  your_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. Lowkey a plot twist, but the logic is there. 😭

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.

📁 FILES 📁

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

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

Go peek at mail(1), mesg(1), who(1), write(1), and talkd(8). ✨

💀 BUGS 💀

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

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. Not the compatibility slay we wanted. 🙈

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.

🦋 HISTORY 🦋

The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD. periodt. 👑

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okay bye bestie 💖 this page's source/version is Linux NetKit (0.17), dated November 24, 1999. mwah 💋