FINGER(1)

💖 FINGER(1) — user information lookup program 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the General Commands Manual page for finger, and honestly? she's an icon. a legend. the moment. she's the girl who knows everyone's business — logins, real names, terminals, whether you left your mail unread (rude), all of it. let's get into it. 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

finger — user information lookup program

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

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

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💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

finger displays information about the system users. that's the whole gig. she's nosy and she's good at it.

Options are:

• -s — the ✨ quick peek ✨. 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, office location and office phone number.

Login time is displayed as 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. (* means "no idea bestie, she's not telling").

• -l — the 🎀 full lore dump 🎀. 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 “.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 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. (yes, every single login. she does not skip. 👑)

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. (not me checking if they read my message 😭)

• -p — Prevents the -l option of finger from displaying the contents of the “.plan”, “.project” and “.pgpkey” files. privacy era. we respect it. 🙈
• -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.

lowkey important: 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. no cap, she'll just leave a gap where the tea wasn't found.

If no arguments are specified, finger will print an entry for each user currently logged into the system. everyone. at once. the whole group chat. 💀

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 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. (only -l travels, bestie. she does not pack extra bags. 🧳)

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). it's giving protocol girlie. ⭐

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🦋 FILES 🦋

• ~/.nofinger — If finger finds this file in a user's home directory, it will, for finger requests originating outside the local host, firmly deny the existence of that user. For this to work, the finger program, as started by fingerd(8), must be able to see the .nofinger file. This generally means that the home directory containing the file must have the other-users-execute bit set (o+x). See chmod(1). If you use this feature for privacy, please test it with ``finger @localhost'' before relying on it, just in case. 👀 (fr fr, test it. don't just trust the vibe check.)
• ~/.plan
• ~/.project
• ~/.pgpkey — These files are printed as part of a long-format request. The .plan file may be arbitrarily long. like, arbitrarily. she will read the whole essay. 💖

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

chfn(1), passwd(1), w(1), who(1)

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📜 HISTORY 📜

The finger command appeared in 3.0BSD. vintage. iconic. she's been doing this since forever and she ate. 🔥

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and that's the whole page, bestie! this one's from Linux NetKit (0.17), dated August 15, 1999 — so yeah, she's an elder but she still runs the group chat. mwah. 💜✨🎀