The
finger
utility displays information about local and remote system users.
By default, the following information is displayed about each user
currently logged-in to the local host:
login name
user's full name
associated terminal name
idle time
login time
office location
office phone
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 day name 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.
The names of terminals for which write permission is denied (see
mesg(1))
are prepended with an asterisk
(‘\&*’).
Unknown devices as well as nonexistent idle and login times are
displayed as single asterisks.
The options are as follows:
-h
If the
-s
option is also specified, the name of the remote host is displayed instead of
the office location and office phone.
-l
Long format.
Produces a multi-line format displaying all of the information available from
the
-s
option as well as the user's home directory, home phone number, login
shell, mail status, and the contents of the
“.plan”
and
“.project”
files 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
Enable matching of
user
names.
This is disabled by default on systems running YP or with large
password databases.
-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
If the
-s
option is also specified, the office location and office phone is displayed
instead of the name of the remote host.
-p
Prevents
the
-l
option of
finger
from displaying the contents of the
“.plan”
and
“.project”
files.
-s
Short format (default).
The information as described above is displayed in a columnar fashion.
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.
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.