1FINGER(1) BSD General Commands Manual FINGER(1)
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4 finger — user information lookup program
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7 finger [-lmsp] [user ...] [user@host ...]
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10 The finger displays information about the system users.
11 Options are:
13 -s Finger displays the user's login name, real name, terminal name and
15 write status (as a ``*'' after the terminal name if write permis‐
16 sion is denied), idle time, login time, office location and office
17 phone number.
18 Login time is displayed as month, day, hours and minutes, unless
20 more than six months ago, in which case the year is displayed
21 rather than the hours and minutes.
22 Unknown devices as well as nonexistent idle and login times are
24 displayed as single asterisks.
25 -l Produces a multi-line format displaying all of the information
27 described for the -s option as well as the user's home directory,
28 home phone number, login shell, mail status, and the contents of
29 the files “.plan”, “.project”, “.pgpkey” and “.forward” from the
30 user's home directory.
31 Phone numbers specified as eleven digits are printed as ``+N-NNN-
33 NNN-NNNN''. Numbers specified as ten or seven digits are printed
34 as the appropriate subset of that string. Numbers specified as
35 five digits are printed as ``xN-NNNN''. Numbers specified as four
36 digits are printed as ``xNNNN''.
37 If write permission is denied to the device, the phrase ``(messages
39 off)'' is appended to the line containing the device name. One
40 entry per user is displayed with the -l option; if a user is logged
41 on multiple times, terminal information is repeated once per login.
42 Mail status is shown as ``No Mail.'' if there is no mail at all,
44 ``Mail last read DDD MMM ## HH:MM YYYY (TZ)'' if the person has
45 looked at their mailbox since new mail arriving, or ``New mail
46 received ...'', `` Unread since ...'' if they have new mail.
47 -p Prevents the -l option of finger from displaying the contents of
49 the “.plan”, “.project” and “.pgpkey” files.
50 -m Prevent matching of user names. User is usually a login name; how‐
52 ever, matching will also be done on the users' real names, unless
53 the -m option is supplied. All name matching performed by finger
54 is case insensitive.
55 If no options are specified, finger defaults to the -l style output if
57 operands are provided, otherwise to the -s style. Note that some fields
58 may be missing, in either format, if information is not available for
59 them.
60 If no arguments are specified, finger will print an entry for each user
62 currently logged into the system.
63 Finger may be used to look up users on a remote machine. The format is
65 to specify a user as “user@host”, or “@host”, where the default output
66 format for the former is the -l style, and the default output format for
67 the latter is the -s style. The -l option is the only option that may be
68 passed to a remote machine.
69 If standard output is a socket, finger will emit a carriage return (^M)
71 before every linefeed (^J). This is for processing remote finger requests
72 when invoked by fingerd(8).
73
75 ~/.nofinger If finger finds this file in a user's home directory, it
76 will, for finger requests originating outside the local
77 host, firmly deny the existence of that user. For this
78 to work, the finger program, as started by fingerd(8),
79 must be able to see the .nofinger file. This generally
80 means that the home directory containing the file must
81 have the other-users-execute bit set (o+x). See
82 chmod(1). If you use this feature for privacy, please
83 test it with ``finger @localhost'' before relying on it,
84 just in case.
85 ~/.plan
87 ~/.project
89 ~/.pgpkey These files are printed as part of a long-format
91 request. The .project file is limited to one line; the
92 .plan file may be arbitrarily long.
93
95 chfn(1), passwd(1), w(1), who(1)
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98 The finger command appeared in 3.0BSD.
99Linux NetKit (0.17) August 15, 1999 Linux NetKit (0.17)