Maybe you want to finger me

# It sounds filthy

There are much worse ways to spend your day than noodling around in
linux fingering other users. It sounds way more fun than it is, but it
can be very useful.


## What the heck is finger anyway?

From the man page:

    NAME
         finger — user information lookup program
    
    SYNOPSIS
         finger [-lmsp] [user ...] [user@host ...]
    
    DESCRIPTION
         The finger displays information about the system users.

[man: finger](https://linux.die.net/man/1/finger)

Basically, finger is a way of learning a little bit about your fellow
tilde.team users. Only the bits they are willing to share.

For instance, if you finger me:

    finger snubspreker

You'll get:

    Login: snubspreker    			Name: 
    Directory: /home/snubspreker        	Shell: /bin/bash
    On since Mon Apr 13 11:20 (EDT) on pts/98 from 2600:1702:1220:e450::2f
        5 seconds idle
    On since Sun Apr 12 22:51 (EDT) on pts/220 from tmux(16145).%67
       30 minutes 35 seconds idle
    On since Wed Apr  8 16:46 (EDT) on pts/236 from tmux(16145).%1
       4 days 2 hours idle
    On since Wed Apr  8 16:46 (EDT) on pts/239 from tmux(16145).%3
       3 days 3 hours idle
    On since Sat Apr 11 18:44 (EDT) on pts/251 from tmux(16145).%60
       2 hours 21 minutes idle
    No mail.
    Project:
    Right now, just tinkering with tilde.team and remembering the good old days.
    
    Plan:
    Writing a little about chaos and butterflies. Maybe contributing a little too.
    snubspreker@tilde.team
    
    If you insist upon being rediculous, I'm gonna make it difficult for you.

But, if you finger another user, you might find that either **Plan:**
or **Project:** maybe both are missing.


## .project and .plan

If you want other users to know a little bit more than finger
provides, you can populate these two files in your *$HOME* directory
with that information. What you choose to include is up to you, but
creating them is easy.

    touch ~/.plan ~/.project
    chmod o+rx ~/.plan ~/.project

Now anybody can finger you.


## Remote fingering

You don't need to be logged in to your tilde.team account to finger
your favorite user, you don't even need an account. You can remotely
finger a user from your own system. You just need a finger client and
if you are a linux user, chances are good that you have one
already. Unless you are an arch user. The reason is simple, with arch
you may need it and you may not but that is for you to decide. If you
decide you need it then you can install it. Very simply.

To install finger on arch *(which is all I care about because that is
what I use)* use pacman.

    pacman -Syu netkit-bsd-finger

[man: pacman(8)](https://www.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman.8.html)

Your system may require you to *sudo* pacman but pacman will let you
know if that is the case.

Now, from your laptop/desktop terminal window just type:

    finger snubspreker@tilde.team

to finger me long distance. I am boring so you will not be entertained.

Well, I think that is all for now.


## Better resources

There are much better resources than me for detailed information on finger.

[HowtoGeek: How to Use the finger Command on Linux](https://www.howtogeek.com/440391/how-to-use-the-finger-command-on-linux/)
[Indiana University: ARCHIVED: In Unix, how do I make plan and project files that will show up when people finger my account?](https://kb.iu.edu/d/afky)

tags: linux cli commands finger