Finger

The finger command showed a detailed list of the user information. Information only for that user is displayed if a user name is specified. Information for all users presently logged in to the system is displayed if no user name is given.

Syntax

finger [-lmsp]

Options are:

-l          Produces a multi-line format displaying all of the information that described for the -s option as well as the user's home phone number, home directory, mail status, login shell and the contents of the files that are .project , .plan and .forward from the user's home directory.

-m      Avoids matching of user names. User is commonly a login name; therefore, matching will also be completed on the user real names, if not the -m option is supplied. All name matching performed via finger is case insensitive.

-p         Avoids the -l option of finger from showing the contents of the .project and .plan files.

-s         Finger shows the user's login name, real name, terminal name and write the status (as a "*" after the terminal name if write permission is denied), login time, idle time, office location and office phone number.  User Login time is shown as month, day, hours and minutes, unless more than six months ago, in that case the year is shown rather than the minutes and hours.

The finger command will shown in multi-column format the subsequent information about every logged-in user:

+  user name    +  user's full name

+  terminal name (prefixed with a '*' (asterisk)  if  write-permission is denied)

+  idle time

+  login time

+  host name, if logged in remotely

The given options can be used

-f  (short format) Suppresses the printing of the header line.

Practice 1

The given example displays the usage of the finger command.

# finger root

Login name:- root                   In real life:- Super-User

Directory: /      Shell: /sbin/sh

On since May 15 13:37:52 on pts/0 from 80.0.0.97

25 minutes Idle Time

Mail last read Fri May 14 20:22:14 1999

No Plan.

In the above example it can displays in which the finger command shows information about the user such as login name, directory, idle time, time at which the last mail was received etc.