What is the "finger" protocol and how can I use it?

Created May 4, 2012

Tim Rohaly

The finger protocol, defined in RFC 1288, is a way to obtain information about users on a remote machine. A user running a finger client can query a server for a list of users or to obtain information about a given user. This requires a finger server to be running on the target machine.

RFC 1288 contains the complete protocol specification. It can be found at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1288.html.

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