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finger

finger is a modern finger-protocol client.

The fingerverse (i.e., the collection of all finger-sites) is an early Internet-based social networks, with its origins in the early 1970s. Like with a lot of things from the early Internet — the fingervese is a decentralized network.

Try It Out

Once you have finger installed, try running this command:

finger [email protected]

Although there are other ways you can use finger — in most case, you are probably going to use finger in this way. But just with a different query.

For example, here is a similar example usage of finger but with a different query (of the same user@host type):

finger [email protected]

Finger Query

The way you can understand a finger-query is:

    finger [email protected]
           \_____/ \_________/
             |           |
         a person      a community
             or           named
         a service     “example.com”
           named
         “joeblow”

So with this query —

  • there is a community (running on a computer connected to the Internet) called “example.com”, and
  • there is a person (within that community) whose username is “joeblow”.

Usage

Here is how, in general, you can use finger:

finger [/switch] [user][@host…]

So we see that, finger can be called with:

  • an optional switch,
  • an optional user, and
  • zero, one, or many @host

Here are a bunch of examples to try to help show what this really means:

finger
finger /W
finger /W joeblow
finger /W [email protected]
finger /W [email protected]@reiver.link
finger /W @example.com
finger /W @[email protected]
finger joeblow
finger [email protected]
finger [email protected]@reiver.link
finger @example.com
finger @[email protected]
finger [email protected]@[email protected]@fource.net
finger /PULL [email protected]
finger /PUSH [email protected]
finger /LIST [email protected]
finger /PICK [email protected]
finger /path/to/something.ext
finger /path/to/something.ext [email protected]
finger /path/to/something.ext [email protected]@reiver.link

Whois Switch

Traditionally you could get more information if you use something called the whois switch.

The way you can use the whois switch is like this —

If this is what you planned to query (without the whois switch):

finger [email protected]

Then to add the whois switch do this:

finger /W [email protected]

Note that the /W was added in the middle. It is that simple.

(Although note that — some finger-servers show more information. But some do not.)

Custom Switches

finger allows for custom switches.

I.e., switches other than '/W'

So, for example, if we wanted to do a finger-request with a (custom) /PULL switch, then we could do it like this:

finger /PULL [email protected]

We could also use any other name:

finger /PUSH [email protected]
finger /LIST [email protected]
finger /BANANA [email protected]

It is up to the finger-server if it will handle the customer switch or not. It might not.

Author

Application finger was written by Charles Iliya Krempeaux