You can only run the who or ps commands on a machine if you can log in to that machine. Not so with the finger command. You can use finger on a remote machine just as easily; you just have to precede the machine name with an at sign (@). For example, if I want to see what’s going on at a remote machine called rock, I can run finger on that machine:
% finger @rock.west.ora.com
[rock.west.ora.com]
Trying 198.112.209.1...
rock — Home of ORA-WEST 1-800-998-9938
12:12pm up 4 days, 11:46, 59 users, load average: 4.80, 5.51, 5.19
-User --Full name- -What Idle TTY -Console Location-
abbot Abbot Chambers pine 2 p9 xterm36 (X Window)
tcsh 1:40 q3 xterm36 (X Window)
pico 6 s8 xterm36 (X Window)
allen Allen Noren vi 32 p5 xterm23 (X Window)
csh 2:03 s6 xterm23 (X Window)
xmosai 2:03 s7 xterm23 (X Window)
csh 34 t4 xterm23 (X Window)
andrea Andrea Reust csh 2:16 pb xterm32 (X Window)
ann Ann Lennon csh 3:45 qe xterm31 (X Window)
...I don’t rely on finger much
A lot of people on the Internet can’t be “fingered,” and many commercial networks like CompuServe and America Online don’t support finger access anyway.
I recently fingered my brother and the response said he “never logged on,” which I knew was not true. So I don’t trust it all that much.
Usually I use finger to check to see if someone’s read some email I sent, or just to get an idea of how often they’re reading it to see if a phone call would be more appropriate. As with email receipts, though, there’s no absolute guarantee that the person has actually read the mail yet—it could have been forwarded to another system.
Mike Sierra
Not all sites support finger, so this may not work for all systems. But it works on rock. Even though I have an account on rock, using finger is faster than logging in remotely and running who.
I can also look at what a single user is doing on a remote machine, by specifying their name followed by an at sign followed by the hostname (i.e., similar to an email address on the Internet). For example, let’s see what my father-in-law at MIT is up to. (His login name and machine name have been changed to protect his dignity.)
% finger [email protected] [atom.mit.edu] Trying 18.62.1.73... Login name: dan In real life: Dan K. Directory: /u/dan Shell: /bin/csh On since Oct 20 07:58:49 on console 261 days Idle Time Plan: ... Login name: dan In real life: Dan K. Directory: /u/dan Shell: /bin/csh On since Oct 20 11:20:21 on ttyp3 1 hour 15 minutes Idle Time ...
I’m sparing you the screenfuls of output. But from this, I found out that my father-in-law has at least one window in which he worked today, which means he’s in town this week and not off at a physicists’ convention or whatever it is they do.
Notice that although you use the same sort of syntax that you would for an email address, you can’t assume that any email address will work. In fact, many email addresses won’t, since many sites have a policy of not giving out real login names for email addresses, just mail aliases. The email address I give out to people is [email protected], but if people try using finger on this address, finger won’t know who I am.