comps' "standard" group spring cleaning?

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, John.Florian at dart.biz <John.Florian at dart.biz> said:
> I use finger effectively without a finger server, on a single-user 
> workstation (in multi-user mode, of course).  I believe it's getting the 
> data via NSS and in my case that means LDAP.  That's not too esoteric 
> IMHO.

Yeah, finger is kind of a multi-purpose tool.  It can show logged-in
users as well as fetch info about any user.

Without it, you can use who/w to see logged-in users and
"getent passwd <foo>" to fetch user info (and "parse" it yourself).

For that matter, except for the network "finger" protocol (which as
mentioned, is pretty much dead, except for the ever-popular BOFH server
at bofh at wisc.edu), it would be fairly easy to replace finger with a
shell script that calls the above based on the arguments.  Even the
network side could be done (with no error checking) in bash with:

(echo -e 'bofh\r' 1>&0; cat) <> /dev/tcp/wisc.edu/finger

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.