If you wish to talk to someone on you 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.
If you want 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, it sends the message
Message from TalkDaemon@his_machine... talk: connection requested by your_name@your_machine. talk: respond with: talk your_name@your_machineto the user to whom you wish to talk.
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 <Ctrl>L will cause the screen to be reprinted, while your erase and kill characters will behave normally. In addition, <Ctrl>W is defined as a word-kill character. 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(C)
command. At the outset talking is allowed. Certain
commands, in particular nroff and
pr(C)
disallow messages to prevent messy output.
talk may be confused if you attempt to use the host.user format with a fully qualified hostname.