3. Beginner's guide on using IRC

The standard IRC client is the original ircII client. It's part of most Linux distributions.

3.1. Running the ircII program

It's easy to use ircII. Let's say you want to connect to irc.openprojects.net with the nick mini-HOWTO.

At the command line, type:

$ irc mini-HOWTO irc.openprojects.net

You can also export variables so you won't need to use them at the command line:

$ export IRCNICK=mini-HOWTO IRCSERVER=irc.openprojects.net

Add them to your shell profile (e.g. ~/.bash_profile or ~/.zprofile) when you're done.

Other common variables are IRCNAME and IRCUSER, to respectively set the ircname part of a /whois and username as seen at the first line 'mini-HOWTO is ~username@hostname (IRCNAME)'. Keep in mind that IRCUSER won't work if you run an ident daemon (default on most distributions). If you still need to change your username (not recommended, and I hope you're not using IRC logged as root!), install oidentd from http://ojnk.sourceforge.net/, create /etc/identd.spoof with a list of users allowed to spoof their ident, and ~/.ispoof with their reply (e.g. reply). Finally run '/usr/local/sbin/oidentd -g nobody -N -s -u nobody'. Add this to your startup scripts (e.g. /etc/rc.d/rc.local) when you're done.

If not set, IRCNICK, IRCUSER, and IRCNAME will be retrieved from /etc/passwd .

3.2. Commands

Use /help to get a list on all available commands (/help help is a good start). Replace nick by any IRCNICK.

3.3. IRC Etiquette

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$ man adduser

On Linux channels you shouldn't: