FINGER(1)                 BSD General Commands Manual                FINGER(1)

NAME
     finger -- user information lookup program

SYNOPSIS
     finger [-46gklmpsho] [user ...] [user@host ...]

DESCRIPTION
     The finger utility displays information about the system users.

     Options are:

     -4      Forces finger to use IPv4 addresses only.

     -6      Forces finger to use IPv6 addresses only.

     -g      This option restricts the gecos output to only the users' real
             name.  It also has the side-effect of restricting the output of
             the remote host when used in conjunction with the -h option.

     -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.

     -k      Disable all use of utmpx(5).

     -l      Produce 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, .project and .pubkey 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
             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 ``(mes-
             sages 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;
             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      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      Prevent the -l option of finger from displaying the contents of
             the .forward, .plan, .project and .pubkey files.

     -s      Display 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 -o is given, the
             office location and office phone number is printed (the default).
             If -h is given, the remote host is printed instead.

             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.  If it
             is an ``*'', the login time indicates the time of last login.
             Login time is displayed as the day name if less than 6 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.

     The finger utility 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.

     If the file .nofinger exists in the user's home directory, and the pro-
     gram is not run with superuser privileges, finger behaves as if the user
     in question does not exist.

     The optional finger.conf(5) configuration file can be used to specify
     aliases.  Since finger is invoked by fingerd(8), aliases will work for
     both local and network queries.

ENVIRONMENT
     The finger utility utilizes the following environment variable, if it
     exists:

     FINGER      This variable may be set with favored options to finger.

FILES
     /etc/finger.conf  alias definition data base
     /var/log/lastlog  last login data base

SEE ALSO
     chpass(1), w(1), who(1), finger.conf(5), fingerd(8)

     D. Zimmerman, The Finger User Information Protocol, RFC 1288, December,
     1991.

HISTORY
     The finger command appeared in 3.0BSD.

BUGS
     The current FINGER protocol RFC requires that the client keep the connec-
     tion fully open until the server closes.  This prevents the use of the
     optimal three-packet T/TCP exchange.  (Servers which depend on this
     requirement are bogus but have nonetheless been observed in the Internet
     at large.)

     The finger utility does not recognize multibyte characters.

BSD                              July 17, 2004                             BSD