💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~nristen › gemlog › 20211116.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 17:27:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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Nristen's (g)log
2021-11-16
I had heard of the finger command not too long after starting to learn about linux however the systems that I logged into never were used as multi user hangouts so I never played with it and eventually forgot about it until recently when I saw it mentioned in a number of gemini posts.
This evening, I opened up the finger man page and started reading it for the first time.
Wow! It is actually pretty cool. It can be used almost like a blog and you even use it to access finger content on remote servers.
I now regularly log into some of the tilde linux systems which usually have quite a few users logged in so finger now looks quite interesting.
Basically, finger displays information about the linux user as well as the content of several dot files located in home directory of the user.
Years ago, when I worked for an ISP I found out about .forward files that could be used to forward email to other addresses but I never knew that finger would display this information. Also finger displays the information in the following files:
Finger can also be used with remote users on other servers if of course, the finger server is running there and is not blocked.
finger <user>@<remote server>
I have not looked at the finger server (fingerd) for any security vulnerabilities, but I believe that displaying user info like this to the public is too big of a security risk.
Anyway, I am glad I finally read the finger man page and learned more about what it is.
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