NAME

     finger — user information lookup program

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

     The finger displays information about the system users.

     Options are:

     -s    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.

           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.

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

     -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 “.plan”, “.project”, “.pgpkey” and “.forward”
           from the user's home directory.

           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 their mailbox since new mail
           arriving, or ``New mail received ...'', ``  Unread since ...'' if they have new mail.

     -p    Prevents the -l option of finger from displaying the contents of the “.plan”,
           “.project” and “.pgpkey” files.

     -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.

     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.

     If standard output is a socket, finger will emit a carriage return (^M) before every
     linefeed (^J). This is for processing remote finger requests when invoked by fingerd(8).

FILES

     ~/.nofinger      If finger finds this file in a user's home directory, it will, for finger
                      requests originating outside the local host, firmly deny the existence of
                      that user.  For this to work, the finger program, as started by fingerd(8),
                      must be able to see the .nofinger file. This generally means that the home
                      directory containing the file must have the other-users-execute bit set
                      (o+x). See chmod(1).  If you use this feature for privacy, please test it
                      with ``finger @localhost'' before relying on it, just in case.

     ~/.plan

     ~/.project

     ~/.pgpkey        These files are printed as part of a long-format request. The .plan file
                      may be arbitrarily long.

SEE ALSO

     chfn(1), passwd(1), w(1), who(1)

HISTORY

     The finger command appeared in 3.0BSD.