Programs: chat

This is a collection of shell scripts implementing a fully functional chat room. The members of the chat need an account on the same UNIX machine. I wrote these scripts ages ago on one of the first real UNIX computer I had access to (under HP-UX). At that time I was playing around with shell scripts and as this computer had no talk program I decided to write one for me and my friends.

You have to start two programs: ptd is the server, it will listen for messages and print them and pt is the client, that lets you send messages to other people in the chat. You need two shells for the two programs. Use splitvt (available on a FTP server near you) for a comfortable view or use the provided chat.el to start the chat inside emacs! There are some other scripts to send messages from the command line and so on. Look at the source and figure it out for yourself.

This program was never meant to be used on somebody elses computer, so you have to fix some pathnames to get it to work. And there is no documentation. Sorry! I just put this here because I think it's a neat collection of scripts that show what you can do with a shell. (By the way, the scripts were originally written in ksh (yuck!), but they work equally well with zsh and are probably easily ported to the Bourne Shell.)

Download chat.tar.gz.