GNU Finger is a utility program designed to allow users of Unix hosts on the Internet network to get information about each other. It is a direct replacement for the Berkeley 4.3 finger code, although it produces different looking output and is designed to run on a wide variety of systems.
Originally, each host on the Internet network consisted of a single, reasonably powerful computer, capable of handling many users at the same time. Typically, a site (physical location of computer users) would have only one or two computers, even if they had 20 or more people who used them. If a user at site A wanted to know about users logged on at site B, a simple program could be invoked to query the host at site B about the users which were logged on.
With the onset of more-power-per-person computing, the mainframe has been set aside. A modern computing facility usually consists of one user per host, and many hosts per site. This makes it a trial to find out about logged on users at another site, since you must query each host to find out about the single user who is logged on. If the site had 20 hosts, you would have to invoke a finger program 20 times just to find out who was logged on!
GNU Finger is a simple and effective way around this problem. For sites with many hosts, a single host may be designated as the finger server host. This host collects information about who is logged on to other hosts at that site. If a user at site A wants to know about users logged on at site B, only the server host need be queried, instead of each host at that site. This is very convenient.
GNU Finger is a direct replacement for existing finger programs. Since the finger protocol (rules for communication) is very simple, GNU Finger follows that protocol in responding to simple requests. But GNU Finger also implements another protocol which allows two finger programs to exchange information in a predetermined way, which allows faster and wider bandwidth communication.
Finger delivers information about users in varying formats, depending on
how it is invoked. finger invoked without any options performs a
site wide finger request, no matter which machine it has been
invoked from. Switch arguments exist for getting the "long" form of
finger information and for getting information only about the local
machine.
If a user on host A wants to know about a user on host B, finger must make a network connection to host B. If host B is running a finger program, that program is asked to relay information about the user in question through the connection back to host A, where finger can display it.
GNU Finger also runs a server daemon process on the server host, whose job is to keep track of which users are logged in to local machines.
An optional and currently unsupported feature is passing of graphic images. This is built on the new protocol. A user at site A (e.g. MIT) may see the picture of a user at site B (e.g. UCSB), by typing a finger request. The conversion of graphic data from one format to another is done through GNU Finger; no site need know where or how such images are stored on any other site to be able to display those images. You should ask your system administrator to find out whether he has chose to include this functionality on your network.
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