NAME
finger
—
user information lookup
program
SYNOPSIS
finger |
[-468glmpshoT ] [user ...]
[user@host ...] |
DESCRIPTION
Thefinger
utility displays information about the system
users.
Options are:
-4
- Forces
finger
to use IPv4 addresses only. -6
- Forces
finger
to use IPv6 addresses only. -8
- Pass through 8-bit data. This option is intended for enabling 8-bit data output in the fingerd(8) service. Using this from the command line is dangerous, as the output data may include control characters for your terminal.
-s
- Display the user's login name, real name, terminal name and write status
(as a ``*'' before the terminal name if write permission is denied), idle
time, login time, and either office location and office phone number, or
the remote host. If
-o
is given, the office location and office phone number is printed (the default). If-h
is given, the remote host is printed instead.Idle time is in minutes if it is a single integer, hours and minutes if a ``:'' is present, or days if a ``d'' is present. If it is an “*”, the login time indicates the time of last login. Login time is displayed as the day name if less than 6 days, else month, day; hours and minutes, unless more than six months ago, in which case the year is displayed rather than the hours and minutes.
Unknown devices as well as nonexistent idle and login times are displayed as single asterisks.
-h
- When used in conjunction with the
-s
option, the name of the remote host is displayed instead of the office location and office phone. -o
- When used in conjunction with the
-s
option, the office location and office phone information is displayed instead of the name of the remote host. -g
- This option restricts the gecos output to only the users' real name. It
also has the side-effect of restricting the output of the remote host when
used in conjunction with the
-h
option. -l
- Produce a multi-line format displaying all of the information described
for the
-s
option as well as the user's home directory, home phone number, login shell, mail status, and the contents of the files .forward, .plan, .project and .pubkey from the user's home directory.If idle time is at least a minute and less than a day, it is presented in the form ``hh:mm''. Idle times greater than a day are presented as ``d day[s]hh:mm''.
Phone numbers specified as eleven digits are printed as ``+N-NNN-NNN-NNNN''. Numbers specified as ten or seven digits are printed as the appropriate subset of that string. Numbers specified as five digits are printed as ``xN-NNNN''. Numbers specified as four digits are printed as ``xNNNN''.
If write permission is denied to the device, the phrase ``(messages off)'' is appended to the line containing the device name. One entry per user is displayed with the
-l
option; if a user is logged on multiple times, terminal information is repeated once per login.Mail status is shown as ``No Mail.'' if there is no mail at all, ``Mail last read DDD MMM ## HH:MM YYYY (TZ)'' if the person has looked at their mailbox since new mail arriving, or ``New mail received ...'', ``Unread since ...'' if they have new mail.
-p
- Prevent the
-l
option offinger
from displaying the contents of the .forward, .plan, .project and .pubkey files. -m
- Prevent matching of user names.
User is usually a login name; however, matching will
also be done on the users' real names, unless the
-m
option is supplied. All name matching performed byfinger
is case insensitive. -T
- Disable the piggybacking of data on the initial connection request. This option is needed to finger hosts with a broken TCP implementation.
If no options are specified, finger
defaults to the -l
style output if operands are
provided, otherwise to the -s
style. Note that some
fields may be missing, in either format, if information is not available for
them.
If no arguments are specified, finger
will
print an entry for each user currently logged into the system.
The finger
utility may be used to look up
users on a remote machine. The format is to specify a
user as
“user@host
”, or
“@host
”, where the default output
format for the former is the -l
style, and the
default output format for the latter is the -s
style. The -l
option is the only option that may be
passed to a remote machine.
If the file .nofinger exists in the user's
home directory, finger
behaves as if the user in
question does not exist.
The optional
finger.conf(5) configuration file can be used to specify
aliases. Since finger
is invoked by
fingerd(8), aliases will work for both local and network queries.
ENVIRONMENT
The finger
utility utilizes the following
environment variable, if it exists:
FINGER
- This variable may be set with favored options to
finger
.
FILES
- /etc/finger.conf
- alias definition data base
- /var/log/lastlog
- last login data base
SEE ALSO
chpass(1), w(1), who(1), finger.conf(5), fingerd(8)
D. Zimmerman, The Finger User Information Protocol, RFC 1288, December, 1991.
HISTORY
The finger
command appeared in
3.0BSD.
BUGS
The current FINGER protocol RFC requires that the client keep the connection fully open until the server closes. This prevents the use of the optimal three-packet T/TCP exchange. (Servers which depend on this requirement are bogus but have nonetheless been observed in the Internet at large.)