Interactive Chat
Need a quick answer from another user
without sending an email message and waiting for his reply? Want to
have a conversation with your Internet-connected friend in Chile but
don’t have money for an international phone call? An
interactive chat program lets you type text to another user and see
her reply moments later. Chatting, or “instant
messaging,” has become popular. Widely known chat
programs such as iChat, Jabber, and AOL Instant Messenger are
available for Mac OS X. Other programs have been available on Unix
systems for years and are included with Mac OS X. We look at two of
these: talk and IRC.
talk
The
talk program is
simple to use. Give the username (and, optionally, the hostname) of
the person with whom you want to chat. Then talk
will try to notify that person as well as show how to use
talk to complete the connection with you. Both of
your terminal windows will be split into two sections, one for the
text you type and the other for the text you get from the other
person. You can type messages back and forth until one of you uses
Control-C to break the session.
One advantage of talk is its simplicity; if each
of you has a terminal window open, either of you can run the program
at any time; if the other person is logged in, he is notified that
you want to chat and told how to complete the connection. If both
people want to use talk on the same
computer — even if one of them is logged in remotely (see Section 7.1) — it should work well. Unfortunately, ...
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