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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T13:05:30+00:00

I want to be able to have two Erlang shells to talk. I’m running

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I want to be able to have two Erlang shells to talk. I’m running on OS X.

I tried the tut17 example here.

I’ve also tried:

$ erl -sname foo

and then in a new Terminal:

$ erl -sname bar

(bar@elife)1> net_adm:ping(foo@elife).
pang

Any ideas?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s kind of broken on the mac. By default, the mac can’t resolve its own shortname. Your host’s name is really probably “elife.local”.

    If you start erl with -name FQDN, then the pings will work.

    ie: you would start it with

    $ erl -name foo@elife.local

    this probably could be fixed by making the mac capable of resolving it’s own short name

    Here’s example output from my mac. When I do -sname I get the same result as you.

    The first node:

    $ erl -name foo@mookie.local
Erlang R13B03 (erts-5.7.4) [source] [smp:2:2] [rq:2] [async-threads:0] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V5.7.4  (abort with ^G)
(foo@mookie.local)1>

    The other node:

    $ erl -name bar@mookie.local
Erlang R13B03 (erts-5.7.4) [source] [smp:2:2] [rq:2] [async-threads:0] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V5.7.4  (abort with ^G)
(bar@mookie.local)1> net_adm:ping('foo@mookie.local').
pong
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