Finger For Linux

Finger is a utility program designed to allow users of Unix hosts on the Internet network to get information about each other.

Finger is a direct replacement for the Berkeley 4.3 finger code, although it produces different looking output and is designed to run on a wide variety of systems.

The basic argument to Finger is a user@host pair. The user portion is the name of the user about whom you would like information. The host is a machine that the user has an account on. When invoked in this manner, GNU Finger displays the list of hosts that this user is currently logged in on, or, if the user is not logged in, the last time and location that he or she was. host may be expressed as any valid Internet address (i.e. dot-notation, host.domain, etc).

If host is non-existent, the local host is assumed. If user is blank or unspecified, it is assumed that you want information about all users.

The content and format of the output of GNU finger depends on what is being fingered:

User Displays login information about user. If `--info' or `--l' is also specified, finger will display the full name, home directory, shell, mail forwarding, and `.plan' and/or `.project' file. This is what the output will look like:

bash$ finger --info [email protected] [apple-gunkies.gnu.ai.mit.edu]

Jan Brittenson (bson) Home: /home/fsf/bson Shell: /usr/local/bin/bash Mail forwarded to [email protected]. No mail.

User Real Name What Idle TTY Host Console Location bson Jan Brittenson fgrep *p0 apple-gu (nutrimat.gnu.ai.) bson Jan Brittenson 1:57 *sb nutrimat