FINGER(1) BSD General Commands Manual FINGER(1)NAMEfinger — user information lookup program
SYNOPSISfinger [-8ghlmops] [user ...] [user@host ...]
DESCRIPTION
The finger 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 pre‐
sented in the form “hh:mm”. Idle times greater than a day are pre‐
sented 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 speci‐
fied 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; how‐
ever, 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 instead of the name of
the remote host.
-p Prevents the -l option of finger from displaying the contents of
the “.forward”, “.plan” and “.project” files.
-sfinger 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 min‐
utes 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.
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.
FILES
/var/log/lastlog last login data base
SEE ALSOchpass(1), w(1), who(1)HISTORY
The finger command appeared in 3.0BSD.
BSD September 12, 2002 BSD
