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Chapter 3: Information Resources
From the Fermilab at Work page, directories are available to point you to information about Fermilab personnel and the high energy physics community at large. These directories typically contain general information such as email addresses, phone numbers, and office locations.
finger is used to find out about other users. It searches for matching account names and first or last names, if known. Depending on the vendor implementation, it may display the name of the person associated with each account, the login name, the home directory and login shell, the contents of the file .plan in the person's home directory, and possibly other information such as waiting mail, and time of last login. If the person is logged in, it also may display information about his or her current sessions.
Note that each vendor has a different implementation of finger. In addition, for security reasons many sites disable the output of finger over the network. It is therefore unwise to rely on the format, content, or even the availability of finger as a tool for finding out about users or their accounts.
The format of the finger command is:
% finger [options] [name...]
where name can be a part of a personal name or a username. If you specify the option -m, then name is matched only to account name and not the rest of the personal name.
We encourage you to create a .plan file. It is just a text file in which you might include information such as your office location, phone numbers, mail station, home address, schedule, emergency numbers, and so on.
finger can often be used to look up users on a remote machine by specifying the name in the standard internet form user@host. This form works on VMS machines with MultiNet running, but in this case name must be the username; otherwise not much useful information is obtained.
As an alternative, point your favorite browser to the location http://fnal.fnal.gov/finger/.
The command who lists certain information about the users on your system.
% who
If used with the -q option, only the names of the logged in users and the number of users are displayed.
The who am i form identifies the invoking user. The command format is:
% who am i
There are a number of options which you can read about in the man pages.