Using e-mail

Holding conversations using talk

You can write messages to users currently logged in to your system by using the talk command. This is useful when you need to communicate with someone at another terminal immediately.

To establish a connection using talk, use the command:

talk login

where login is the login name of the person that you want to talk to.

A message appears on their terminal, asking them to ``talk'' back to you. Once they run talk (using your login as the argument), your terminal displays two windows; one shows anything that you type, the other shows anything that they type:

For example, assuming your login is perry, and you want to talk to nigella, type:

talk nigella

Nigella's terminal beeps, and a message appears:

   Message from Talk_Daemon@machina.plains.sit.COM at 9:49 ...
   talk: connection requested by perry@machina.plains.sit.COM
   talk: respond with: talk perry@machina.plains.sit.COM

To reply, nigella types:

talk perry

Everything perry types appears in the upper window on his screen, and in the lower window on nigella's screen. The talk conversation occurs in real time with each character being sent as you type it. This means that the other person will be able to watch you correct your spelling mistakes, and may even comment on how slowly you type!

To quit talk, press <Del> (or your interrupt character).

NOTE: If a user is logged in with multiscreens or on different terminals, you will need to specify the terminal to talk to. Use the command w to list users and terminals. It is a bad idea to talk to a terminal running an interactive application like mail, vi or the SCO Shell, because this may corrupt the screen display.

A similar facility to talk is provided by write(C). This sends a line at a time to the other person and it does not use a special split-screen display.