wayne@csri.toronto.edu (Wayne Hayes) (11/29/89)
My friend and I were recently discussing when it should be OK for someone to send someone else a talk request. (ASIDE: for those of you who don't know about / don't have the talk(1) command: it is a very nice person-to-person full-screen interface for cleanly handling live, online 2-way conversations in real time. You type, and your characters appear in the top window, and your partner's type appears in the bottom window, with the windows separated with a line of "-"'s. When you want to talk at someone, you type "talk userId@machine", and wait while it "rings" at the other end. The recipient gets a bell on their terminal along with a rather messy 3-5 line summary of who's calling from where and how to respond if you want to talk with them.) Whenever I want to talk to someone, I usually use the "w" command to check what they are currently doing. My friend agrees with this courteous practice. Our differences arise when we try to decide what type of activity is worthy of not being interupted by a talk request. It is obviously a matter of preference, but I basically say that as long as there is no chance of corrupting data at either end, or interupting another talk/write session that the recipient may be having, it's ok to send a talk request. (Example of possible data corruption: the recipient is logged in via modem and is currently engaged in an up/download. Having a bonus of 5 lines of garbage appearing during a block transfer could be disasterous. I even turn off message acceptance while I'm doing modem transfers to avoid this. Besides, most PC software programs are not in terminal mode while doing file transfers {it's not possible as far as I can see}, so the recipient won't see the request anyway.) My friend says that he prefers not to get talk requests when he is doing *anything* full-screen, like editing, or basically anything except sitty idly in the shell. Of course all this assumes you are NOT in a windowing environment. I can send requests to users with multiple windows no problem. I just chose the window with the least activity (although this has been known to cause grief at the repipient's end as he flips through 17 layers of 12-day old windows looking for the one that's beeping at him.) So, has there been any discussion about this topic before? Is there an established etiquette? -- The 'C' programming language is, at worst, the second best language for any given application. Usually, however, it is the best. -- anon Wayne Hayes INTERNET: wayne@csri.toronto.edu CompuServe: 72401,3525
unccab@calico.med.unc.edu (Charles Balan) (11/29/89)
In article <1989Nov29.041239.16159@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> wayne@csri.toronto.edu (Wayne Hayes) writes: >My friend and I were recently discussing when it should be OK for >someone to send someone else a talk request. (stuff deleted that I already understand) > Whenever I want to talk to someone, I usually use the "w" >command to check what they are currently doing. My friend agrees >with this courteous practice. Um, excuse me, but what is the "w" command? I use talk quite often, but have never used a "w" to check what the user is currently doing. And how would I be able to check which window is more/less busy to send my talk to? And how do I send a talk to a specific window? Wow, I thought I knew how to use this baby! :-) >Wayne Hayes INTERNET: wayne@csri.toronto.edu CompuServe: 72401,3525 I would also like to see a "talk-etiquette" guideline/rules posted, if there is any such animal. Charles Balan UNCCAB@med.unc.edu , UNCCAB@uncmed.uucp , UNCCAB@unc.bitnet %%%%%%%%%%%%% A Witty Saying Proves Nothing - Voltaire %%%%%%%%%%%%
epsilon@wet.UUCP (Eric P. Scott) (11/30/89)
In article <1989Nov29.041239.16159@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> wayne@csri.toronto.edu (Wayne Hayes) writes: > It is obviously a matter of preference You've answered your own question. Whatever you agree on is accepted etiquette. Personally, I prefer talk-like programs to a barrage of write(1)s. > (Example >of possible data corruption: the recipient is logged in via modem >and is currently engaged in an up/download. Having a bonus of 5 >lines of garbage appearing during a block transfer could be >disasterous. I even turn off message acceptance while I'm doing >modem transfers to avoid this. Any decent transfer program will do this automatically--the "original" UNIX program that disabled messages while it ran was pr(1). ex/vi has an option to do this while you're in visual mode. And yes, you can always do mesg n if you're not sure. A.D.T.P. will also NOT find a bunch of garbage disastrous; it just won't do the "intended" thing (display the message). -=EPS=- BTW, someone else asked abouut the "w" program--this is peculiar to BSD UNIX systems. Sys V users might find the "whodo" program an acceptable substitute. The talk referred to above is also a BSDism, although equivalents for other systems might be found in the comp.sources.unix archives. Who knows, I might even post one (yes, I got the hint, thank you).
subbarao@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kartik Saligrama Subbarao) (11/30/89)
The w command is a very interesting and useful one! I quote " SYNTAX w [ -h ] [ -s ] [ -l ] [ user ] DESCRIPTION The w command prints a summary of the current activity on the system, including what each user is doing. The heading line shows the current time of day, how long the system has been up, the number of users logged into the system, and the load averages. The load average numbers give the number of jobs in the run queue averaged over 1, 5 and 15 minutes. The fields output are: the users login name, the name of the tty the user is on, the time of day the user logged on, the number of minutes since the user last typed anything, the CPU time used by all processes and their children on that terminal, the CPU time used by the currently active processes, the name and arguments of the current process. The -h flag suppresses the heading. The -s flag asks for a short form of output. In the short form, the tty is abbre- viated, the login time and cpu times are left off, as are the arguments to commands. -l gives the long output, which is the default. The -d flag outputs debug information. The -u flag outputs the same information uptime command. If a user name is included, the output will be restricted to that user. RESTRICTIONS The notion of the ``current process'' is unclear. The current algorithm is roughly ``the last process started on the terminal that is not ignoring interrupts, or, if there is none, the last process started on the terminal''. This fails, for example, in critical sections of programs like the shell and editor, or when faulty programs running in the background fork and fail to ignore interrupts. (In cases where no process can be found, w prints ``-''.) Background processes are not shown, even though they account for much of the load on the system. Sometimes processes, typically those in the background, are printed with null or garbaged arguments. In these cases, the name of the command is printed in parentheses. Mind you, the w command is not perfect, and it won't be accurate 100% of the time. But as far as getting info on other people, the w command is GREAT! Alas, it is not supported on all UNIX systems -- In that case, look up finger, who, rusers, rwho and similar commands! As to talking to a SPECIFIC window, you first have to get the person's tty# (with w or some other command). Then, it is simple. Type talk userid tty# where tty# is the tty on which you want to talk to the person. That's all there is to it! -An up and coming UNIX personality, Kartik Subbarao P.S. Please, no Miss Manners on talk!! PLEASE!!!! subbarao@phoenix.princeton.edu subbarao@gauguin.princeton.edu subbarao@bogey.princeton.edu
johnb@lakesys.lakesys.com (John C. Burant) (12/02/89)
In 805@wet.com, somebody writes: >You've answered your own question. Whatever you agree on is >accepted etiquette. Personally, I prefer talk-like programs >to a barrage of write(1)s. As for talk programs, you can also try 'conf'... perhaps your system doesn't have it, umm, it's on uunet.uu.net (for ftp), and it floats on most bbs's (ick) that have UNIX file sections... > -=EPS=- >BTW, someone else asked abouut the "w" program--this is peculiar >to BSD UNIX systems. Sys V users might find the "whodo" program >an acceptable substitute. The talk referred to above is also a >BSDism, although equivalents for other systems might be found in >the comp.sources.unix archives. Who knows, I might even post one >(yes, I got the hint, thank you). > I have used a couple of SysV systems (including this system) that have the 'w' command... I've also used a BSD system with it. (can't say about whodo). The talk program isn't just for BSD systems, almost every system, including SysV has it. The only thing peculiar to BSD talk is talking to someone on another system. (Although a sysV system CAN probably run that - but then again, does it ever happen?).. PS - If anyone knows of a talk that is non-BSD that doesn't have that really annoying status bar in the middle (with time, and info, etc... just has a line of ------------'s), please let me know. -John -- John C. Burant | johnb@lakesys.lakesys.com | "Now don't you wish you Glendale, WI | johnb@lakesys.UUCP | had someone with perfect [.signature] | ... uunet!marque!lakesys!johnb | pitch in YOUR band?" --------------------------------------------------------------------------