FINGER(1) UNIX Reference Manual
FINGER(1)NAMEfinger ‐ user information lookup program
SYNOPSISfinger [‐lmsp] [user ...] [user@host ...]
DESCRIPTION
The finger displays information about the system users.
Options are:
‐s Finger displays the user’s login name, real name, ter‐
minal name and
write status (as a ‘‘*’’ after the terminal name if
write permis‐
sion is denied), idle time, login time, office loca‐
tion and office
phone number.
Login time is displayed as month, day, hours and min‐
utes, 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.
‐l Produces a multi‐line format displaying all of the in‐
formation de‐
scribed 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 ‘‘.plan’’, ‘‘.project’’, ‘‘.pgpkey’’ and
‘‘.forward’’
from the user’s home directory.
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 spec‐
ified 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 en‐
try per user is displayed with the ‐l option; if a us‐
er 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 re‐
ceived ...’’, ‘‘ Unread since ...’’ if they have new
mail.
‐p Prevents the ‐l option of finger from displaying the
contents of
the ‘‘.plan’’, ‘‘.project’’ and ‘‘.pgpkey’’ files.
‐m Prevent matching of user names. User is usually a lo‐
gin name; how‐
ever, matching will also be done on the users’ real
names, unless
the ‐m option is supplied. All name matching per‐
formed by finger
is case insensitive.
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.
Finger 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 out‐
put 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 standard output is a socket, finger will emit a carriage
return (^M)
before every linefeed (^J). This is for processing remote
finger requests
when invoked by fingerd(8).
SEE ALSOchfn(1), passwd(1), w(1), who(1)HISTORY
The finger command appeared in 3.0BSD.
Linux NetKit (0.16) August 15, 1999
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