100 Useful Command-Line Utilities

by Oliver; 2014

74. finger

finger is a neat command that prints out information about a user on the system. For example, to finger yourself:

$ finger $( whoami )
Login: my_username                           Name: My Name
Directory: /path/to/home Shell: /bin/bash
Never logged in.
No mail.
Plan:
Hello, fools and lovers!

What's the plan thing? When you finger a user it will output the contents of the file (Was this the genesis of Amherst College's PlanWorld? I think so! :-)

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