Finger

Author

Nimi: Aleksandr Laada A21

Esitamise kuupaev: 07.12.2016

Retsensioon: Talk:Finger Jevgeni Kuzmin A21

Description

finger utility displays information about the system users.

Syntax

finger [-options] [user ...] [user@host ...]

Options

Options are:

• -4 - Forces finger to use IPv4 addresses only.
• -6 - Forces finger to use IPv6 addresses only.
• -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.

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.

• -k - Disable all use of the user accounting database.

• -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.

• -p - Prevent the -l option of finger 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 by finger is case insensitive.

Notice

• 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, and the program is not run with superuser privileges, finger behaves as if the user in question does not exist.

• The optional finger.conf configuration file can be used to specify aliases. Since finger is invoked by fingerd, aliases will work for both local and network queries.

Examples

1. View detail about a particular user

finger command will display login, username, home directory, shell information about a particular user as shown below.

$ finger sathiya
Login: sathiya                          Name: (null)
Directory: /home/sathiya                Shell: /bin/bash
On since Mon Nov  1 18:45 (IST) on :0 (messages off)
On since Mon Nov  1 18:46 (IST) on pts/0 from :0.0
New mail received Fri May  7 10:33 2010 (IST) 
Unread since Sat Jun  7 12:59 2008 (IST)
No Plan.

2. View login details and Idle status about an user

You can use finger -s option to view the login detail for a particular user.

$ finger -s root
Login     Name       		Tty      Idle  Login Time   Office     Office Phone
root         root           *1    19d Wed 17:45
root         root           *2     3d Fri 16:53
root         root           *3        Mon 20:20
root         root           *ta    2  Tue 15:43
root         root           *tb    2  Tue 15:44

Files

/etc/finger.conf - alias definition data base

/var/log/utx.lastlogin - last login data base

Environment

finger This variable may be set with favored options to finger.

Notes

• To use Finger, it is necessary for the host computer to run the Finger daemon (a program running in the background) which will answer Finger requests.

• Finger is not designed to log requests. So finding out who is Fingering you is complicated.

Bugs

• The finger utility does not recognize multibyte characters.

History

finger command appeared in 3.0BSD

Finger was one of the first computer network applications. It enabled people to see who else was using the computer system as well as find basic information on that user. (Zimmerman 1991)

Last version: 0.17-15

Standarts

• RFC 742(December 1977)
• RFC 1288(December 1991)

References

http://www.unix.com/man-page/freebsd/1/finger/

http://www.rajivshah.com/Case_Studies/Finger/Finger.htm#_Toc484593855

http://linux.101hacks.com/unix/finger/