A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux® 8

Communicate over a Network

Many commands that you can use to communicate with other users on a single computer system have been extended to work over a network. Three examples of extended utilities, all of which were introduced in Chapter 3, are electronic mail programs (such as pine), information-gathering utilities (such as finger), and communications utilities (such as talk). These utilities are examples of the UNIX philosophy: Instead of creating a new, special-purpose tool, modify an existing one.

Many utilities understand a convention for the format of network addresses: user@host (spoken as user at host). When you use an @ sign in an argument to one of these utilities, the utility interprets the text that follows as the name of a remote ...