finger

NAME

finger - user information lookup program

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

The finger(1) utility displays information about the system users.

OPTIONS

-d

When used in conjunction with the -s option or with no user specified, print the user name as a fully qualified domain name in the Windows domain+name format. When this option is used, the Idle field is not shown.

-h

Display the name of the remote host instead of the office location and office phone.

-l

Print long 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 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 his or her mailbox since new mail arrived, or New mail received ..., Unread since ... if they have new mail.

-o

The office location and office phone information is displayed instead of the name of the remote host.

-s

The finger(1) utility displays the user's login name, real name, terminal name, and write status (as a * before 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 host is printed. If -o is given, the office location and phone number are printed instead (the default).

Idle time is in minutes if it is a single integer, hours and minutes if a colon (:) is present, or days if a d is present. Login time is displayed as the day name if fewer than six days. It 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. Idle time is not shown if the -d option is given.

Unknown devices and nonexistent idle and login times are displayed as single asterisks.

-p

Prevents the -l option of finger(1) from displaying the contents of the .plan and .project files.

If no options are specified, finger(1) defaults to the -l style output if operands are provided, otherwise to the -s style. Some fields may be missing, in either format, if information is not available for them.

If no arguments are specified, finger(1) will print an entry for each user currently logged into the system.

You can use finger(1) to look up users on a remote computer. The format to use 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 can be passed to a remote computer.

FILES

If present, finger(1) makes use of the following files:

.plan

The finger(1) utility displays the contents of this file in the home directory of the targeted user.

.project

The finger(1) utility displays the contents of this file in the home directory of the targeted user.

SEE ALSO

who(1)