2.11BSD/src/ucb/finger/finger.1

.\" Copyright (c) 1989 The Regents of the University of California.
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.\"	@(#)finger.1	6.9 (Berkeley) 5/18/89
.\"
.TH FINGER 1 "May 18, 1989"
.UC 4
.SH NAME
finger \- user information lookup program
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B finger
[
.B -lmsp
] [user [@host] ...]
.SH DESCRIPTION
The
.I finger
command has two basic output formats providing essentially the same
information.
.PP
The
.I -s
option of
.I 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.
.PP
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 month, day, hours and minutes, unless
more than six months ago, in which case the year is displayed rather
than the hours and minutes.
.PP
Unknown devices as well as nonexistent idle and login times are
displayed as single asterisks.
.PP
The
.I -l
option produces a multi-line format displaying all of the information
described for the
.I -s
option as well as the user's home directory, home phone number, login
shell, and the contents of the files
.I ``.plan''
and
.I ``.project''
from the user's home directory.
.PP
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''.
.PP
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''.
.PP
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
.IR -l
option; if a user is logged on multiple times, terminal information
is repeated once per login.
.PP
The
.I -p
option prevents
the
.I -l
option of
.I finger
from displaying the contents of the ``.plan'' and ``.project''
files.
.PP
Note that some fields may be missing, in either format, if information
is not available for them.
.PP
If no operands are specified,
.I finger
will print an entry for each user currently logged into the system.
If no options are specified,
.I finger
defaults to the
.I -l
style output if operands are provided, otherwise to the
.I -s
style.
.PP
.I User
is usually a login name; however, matching will also be done on the
users' real names, unless the
.I -m
option is supplied.
All name matching performed by
.I finger
is case insensitive.
.PP
.I Finger
may be used to look up users on a remote machine.
The format is to specify a
.I user
as ``user@host'', or ``@host'', where the default output
format for the former is the
.I -l
style, and the default output format for the latter is the
.IR -s
style.
The
.I -l
option is the only option that may be passed to a remote machine.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
chpass(1), w(1), who(1), getpwent(3)