The Guide to Essential IRC Commands

Once inside the Chat Rooms you can use a variety of commands to get around. To use these commands simply type them as you see them below (the bold part including the /). You may want to position this window so you can see it while using your Telnet software so you can refer to the list with the greatest of ease.

Help on User Commands:

/? - List Commands
/HELP - Displays this help screen
/ABOUT - Displays information about the Chat room
/QUIT or /Q - Exit the chat room
/LIST or /L - Lists people on this channel
/LISTALL or /LA - List people on all channels
/DO [action] - Displays an action like "Yourname [action]"
/YELL or /Y[text] - Send a message to all users on all channels
/PAGE or /P [user] - Pages a user
/CHANNEL or /CH [channel] - Change channels
/CHANNEL by itself to list channels and subjects
/WHISPER or /WH [user][message] - Sends a message to a specific user
/SET [variable] [value] - Sets a variable
/SET by itself for a list of variables
/RECENT or /R - Lists recent users of the chat room
/ROLL or /.#d% - Rolls #, % sided dice
/SHOW or /S - Displays status of user variables
/INFO or /I - Displays info about logins, users on, current time
/MSG - Displays a list of messages
/MSG [msg] - Adds a message to the list of messages
/CLEAR - Clears the screen by sending a bunch of blank lines

Variables that can be used with the SET command:

ECHO: ON/OFF Sets whether or not you hear what you say
NAME: Used to change your name while still online
SUBJECT: Used to change the subject of the current channel
AWAY: ON/OFF Set if you are away from terminal
AWAYMSG: Used to set the your "away from terminal" message
IGNORE: Sets a user id that you want to ignore messages from
ANNOUNCE: Sets announcements
USERINFO: User description displayed in user listings

Advanced IRC Commands - Network and Technical

This section deals with IRC Network and Technical Commands. The previous sections will have been enough for you to get the full benefit of IRC but this section is really intended for those of you who want to put "the icing on the cake." You may, from time to time, encounter strange happenings within IRC like being kicked off a channel for no reason at all or even stranger, your messages just don't appear on the screen. This section deals with the IRC commands for finding out the reasoning of these and many other unexplainable happenings.

Networking Commands

This is an informational command for finding out information about the specified server. When used you can find out the nickname and e-mail address of the IRC administration for the specified site. Don't bother the admin unless you are 100% certain that the problems you are encountering lie with their server.

Will give you a list of all the IRC servers that are currently using the network. The [server] option allows you to start the search from a given point and the [expression] option is a wildcard for you to find out information on a given server. Please Note... this list can be huge, if you want to find out information on a particular server you would be best advised to use the /ADMIN command.

This command enables you to switch IRC server to the one specified in your [server] option. If you do not specify a port number in the [port number] option, the default port 6667 is assigned.

These commands ae used to determine the date and time at the specified server, if no server is specified in the [server] option, the default is the server you are currently using.

Technical Commands

Will return a list of information about your connection to and from the specified server.

Will return inforamtion about the creators of IRC

Will return the version number of both the client and server software being used