FINGER(1) BSD General Commands Manual FINGER(1)
NAME
finger -- user information lookup program
SYNOPSIS
finger [-46gklmpsho] [user ...] [user@host ...]
DESCRIPTION
The finger 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.
-g This option restricts the gecos output to only the users' real name. It also has the side-effect sideeffect
effect of restricting the output of the remote host when used in conjunction with the -h
option.
-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.
-k Disable all use of utmpx(5).
-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 con-tents contents
tents 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.
-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
by finger is case insensitive.
-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.
-p Prevent the -l option of finger from displaying the contents of the .forward, .plan, .project
and .pubkey files.
-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.
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 avail-able available
able for them.
If no arguments are specified, finger will print an entry for each user currently logged into the sys-tem. system.
tem.
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, and the program is not run with superuser
privileges, 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.)
The finger utility does not recognize multibyte characters.
BSD July 17, 2004 BSD
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