NAME
finger —
user information lookup
program
SYNOPSIS
finger |
[-8ghlmops]
[user ...]
[user@host ...] |
DESCRIPTION
The
finger utility displays information about the system
users.
Options are:
-
-
- -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.
-
-
- -g
- This option restricts the gecos output to only the users'
real names.
-
-
- -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.
-
-
- -l
- Produces 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” and
“.project” 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.
This is the default.
-
-
- -p
- Prevents the -l option of
finger from displaying the contents of the
“.forward”,
“.plan” and
“.project” files.
-
-
- -s
- finger displays the user's login name,
real name, terminal name and write status (as a “*” after 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
-h is given, the remote is printed. If
-o is given, the office location and phone number is
printed instead (the default).
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. Login
time is displayed as the dayname if less than six 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 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.
FILES
- /var/log/lastlog
- last login data base
SEE ALSO
chpass(1),
w(1),
who(1),
fingerd(8)
HISTORY
The
finger command appeared in
2.0BSD:
ftp://ftp.tuhs.org.ua/PDP-11/Distributions/ucb/2bsd.tar.gz