Re: Text based synchronous communication tool for Linux?

On Mon, 9 Dec 2024 13:45:46 +0000, Geoff Clare wrote:

Muttley wrote:
 

talk is an age old unix util that allows people on the same machine to
chat.
Even MacOS has it installed.

 
"Even" MacOS?  It's required for UNIX® conformance - if MacOS didn't
have talk, it wouldn't be able to be certified as UNIX.

_[/Users/scott]_(scott@Mac-Studio)🍏_
$ type talk
talk is /usr/bin/talk
_[/Users/scott]_(scott@Mac-Studio)🍏_
$ uname -a
Darwin Mac-Studio 23.2.0 Darwin Kernel Version 23.2.0: Wed Nov 15 21:55:06
PST 2023; root:xnu-10002.61.3~2/RELEASE_ARM64_T6020 arm64

That checks out -- it's in the current MacOS.  The man page reports:

HISTORY
     The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD.

     In FreeBSD 5.3, the default behaviour of talk was changed
     to treat local-to-local talk requests as originating and
     terminating at localhost.  Before this change, it was
     required that the hostname (as per gethostname(3))
     resolved to a valid IPv4 address (via gethostbyname(3)),
     making talk unsuitable for use in configurations where
     talkd(8) was bound to the loopback interface (normally for
     security reasons).
 _ _ _ _ _

"ytalk" let's you talk with more than one person at a time, iirc.

--
-Scott System76 Thelio Mega v1.1 x86_64 NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti
   OS: Linux 6.12.4 Release: Mint 21.3 Mem: 258G
   "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be."