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@(#)finger.1 6.14 (Berkeley) 7/27/91
.Dd July 27, 1991 .Dt FINGER 1 .Os BSD 4 .Sh NAME .Nm finger .Nd user information lookup program .Sh SYNOPSIS .Nm finger .Op Fl lmsp .Op Ar user ... .Op Ar user@host ... .Sh DESCRIPTION The .Nm finger displays information about the system users.
p Options are: l -tag -width flag t Fl s .Nm 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.
p 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.
p Unknown devices as well as nonexistent idle and login times are displayed as single asterisks.
p t Fl l Produces a multi-line format displaying all of the information described for the .Fl s option as well as the user's home directory, home phone number, login shell, and the contents of the files .Dq Pa .forward , .Dq Pa .plan and .Dq Pa .project from the user's home directory.
p 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''.
p 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''.
p 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 .Fl l option; if a user is logged on multiple times, terminal information is repeated once per login.
p t Fl p Prevents the .Fl l option of .Nm finger from displaying the contents of the .Dq Pa .forward , .Dq Pa .plan and .Dq Pa .project files. t Fl m Prevent matching of .Ar user names. .Ar User is usually a login name; however, matching will also be done on the users' real names, unless the .Fl m option is supplied. All name matching performed by .Nm finger is case insensitive. .El
p If no options are specified, .Nm finger defaults to the .Fl l style output if operands are provided, otherwise to the .Fl s style. Note that some fields may be missing, in either format, if information is not available for them.
p If no arguments are specified, .Nm finger will print an entry for each user currently logged into the system.
p .Nm Finger may be used to look up users on a remote machine. The format is to specify a .Ar user as .Dq Li user@host , or .Dq Li @host , where the default output format for the former is the .Fl l style, and the default output format for the latter is the .Fl s style. The .Fl l option is the only option that may be passed to a remote machine. .Sh SEE ALSO .Xr chpass 1 , .Xr w 1 , .Xr who 1 , .Sh HISTORY The .Nm finger command appeared in x 3.0 .
Indexes created Thu Oct 23 22:10:10 GMT 2025