Internet Relay Chat

The Internet Relay Chat (IRC), developed by Jarkko Oikarinen in Finland in 1988, provides a way for people on the Internet to carry out a conversation with many different participants, similar to how a telephone chat line operates. The IRC was designed as a major advancement over the talk command, which allows two users to carry on an electronic conversation. Unlike talk, the IRC supports multiple users and multiple simultaneous channels and it has many additional features. Because of its rich set of features and capabilities and because people like to chat, the Internet Chat has become an extremely popular part of the Internet in the past few years.

To use the Internet Relay Chat, you must have an IRC client program installed on your machine. The standard UNIX IRC client program is called ircII. (There are many other IRC client programs; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IRC_clients for a list.) You must also be connected to a network, such as the Internet, that provides a TCP/IP connection to an IRC server. On the Internet, groups of IRC servers are grouped together into IRC networks. Each network can support many different chat rooms, which on IRC are known as channels. There many different IRC networks; some of the largest of these are EFnet, Undernet, IRCnet, and Galaxynet. (See http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/networks/ for a list of IRC networks.) The number of channels on a particular IRC network can be quite large. For example, on the large and widely used EFnet there are often more than 35,000 active channels.

An excellent way to find a particular channel that may be of interest to you is to the SearchIRC site at http://searchirc.com where you can search through more than 650,000 active channels on approximately 3,500 different IRC networks to find channels that may be of interest to you.

As mentioned previously, each conversation using the IRC (on a particular IRC network) takes place on a particular channel. There are some channels that are present on most IRC servers such as EFnet. For example, the channel #hottub is a general meeting place for people to talk about every possible subject. (Note that the names of IRC channels generally begin with the pound sign, #). Other general chat channels are #talk and #chat. There are also channels devoted to discussions of technical topics, such as #unix, #perl, and #linux. And there are channels dedicated to the discussion of particular countries and their cultures, such as #england and #korea. Some channels have chat sessions in languages other than English. For example, #francais has discussions in French and #espanol has discussions in Spanish. You will also encounter channels with discussions in Japanese where Kanji characters are used; you won’t be able to participate in these unless your system supports Kanji characters (and unless you understand Japanese!).

Getting Started with the IRC

If an IRC client, such as ircII, is installed on your system, you can start you IRC session by entering the command

 $ irc

This will connect you to a default IRC server. If ircII is not installed on your system, please see the web site http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/ircii/ for information and instructions about downloading and installing it.

You will now be in an IRC session. You continue by entering IRC commands, each of which begins with a slash (/). If you want to connect to a different IRC server than your default server, use the /server command. For example, to connect to the EFnet server irc. colorado.edu, you enter

 /server irc.colorado.edu

If your connection is successful, you will get a message back from the server to that effect.

 *** Connecting to port s6667 of server irc.colorado.edu

After connecting to a particular IRC server, you are not automatically connected to any channel. The first thing you may want to do is to list all the available channels. When you use the IRC command this way,

 /list

you will see a list of all channels, the number of people currently on each channel, and the topic of the channel (for channels where a topic has been set). Note that you might want to run the command

 /set hold_mode on

before you run the /list command so that only one screen of information will be presented to you at a time.

You can also see who is currently participating in a particular channel using the /who command. For example, to see who is currently taking part in #hottub, you type this:

 /who #hottub

To join a channel, you use the IRC /join command. For example, to join the channel #hottub, you use this command:

 /join #hottub

You can see who is joined to your current channel using the command

 /who *

To exit from a channel, you use the /leave command. For example, when you want to leave #hottub, you use this command:

 /leave #hottub

It is possible to participate in more than one channel. To do so, you must first run the command

 /set novice off

and then use the /join command to join each of the channels you want to participate in.

You can get a brief introduction to the Internet Relay Chat using this command:

 /help intro

Summary of IRC Commands

Table 10–7 lists some of the most important ircII commands and describes what each does. You can find a comprehensive list of ircII commands and their actions at http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/ircii/commands/.

Table 10–7: Some Useful ircll Commands

Command	Action
/help	Lists all IRC commands
/join channel	Joins you to the channel given
/leave channel	Leaves the channel given
/list	Displays information about all channels
/list -max m	Lists channels with no more than m participants
/list -min n	Lists channels with at least n participants
/nick nickname	Sets your nickname to the given nickname
/quit	Ends your IRC session
/who channel	Displays current participants in channel given
/who *	Displays who is a participant in your current channel
/whois *	Displays information about all participants

Running an IRC Server

To set up your machine as an IRC server, you must run the ircd (IRC daemon) program. Doing this is beyond the scope of this book. We recommend you consult the IRC Daemon: IRC Server Software web page at http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/ircd/. You will find useful links for learning how to set up, configure, and maintain an IRC server, as well as links for downloading the necessary software.

Finding Out More about the IRC

Some excellent sources are available to you to find helpful information about the Internet Relay Chat. The Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Help web page at http://www.irchelp.org is a great starting point for useful web resources. You’ll find FAQs, tutorials, help pages, primers, IRC client information, and many other related things at this site. Several books are devoted to the Internet Relay Chat, such as IRC & Online Chat by Powers, The IRC Survival Guide by Harris, and Learn Advanced internet relay Chat by Toyer. You can also consult the book Internet: The Complete Reference, Second Edition.