Talk:Finger (protocol)

Use as a profanity
Could someone add something about the user of "finger" in hacker slang as a profane reference to a sexual act? Similar to the use of fsck as a profanity. There are numerous quotes of people humorously promising to "finger and fsck".

Yes, here's a classic. "unzip && strip && touch && finger && mount && fsck && more && yes && umount && eject && sleep"

All are real commands that would be available on most recent *nix environments. --128.119.16.236 (talk) 16:56, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Why .plan .project?
Anyone know the history behind .plan and .project? It would be interesting to put here as the .plan article redirects here. —Cliffb 06:03, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure what you mean by the "history" behind these. The names begin with a dot because they are hidden dot-files.  And they're called "plan" and "project" because they are supposed to contain your plans and/or projects, shown when you finger another user. Richard W.M. Jones 08:20, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Has anyone seen seen a similarity between facebook and finger. Or, finger as primitive social networking software. Since there is a plan and a project inside... —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jh23542 (talk • contribs) 19:20, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Real Use
I know that elinks has integrated the protocol. but is there any real use for that?  mabdul 0=* 10:51, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I think, also Konqueror is able to handle.

I am looking for some servers running finger. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.141.94.169 (talk) 02:53, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

I am working on an implementation of fingerd and finger for Windows. Yes, there is already a client (last I checked, IIRC) and Microsoft includes a handful of similar utilities, but the protocol is so simple and the implementation so specific to the application that I will start with figuring out what was (is?) typical for the sequence of the parts of the reply of the server (enabling me to expand this article to more thoroughly explain .plan and .project redirecting here) and then create a hypothetical database interface, so that should I have my finger daemon provide real-time, non-falsified information, that part of the system would be automatically compartmentalized, and the command-line utilities will have nearly the same code for Unix or Windows. Fnordly (talk) 13:05, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Security concerns
This section currently mostly blames the demise of the finger protocol on the ability to run Finger without a parameter (and thus get a list of users). But this feature could have been disabled without disabling the whole protocol. After all, wasn't its original use to finger a specific user anyway? -79.180.25.233 (talk) 17:22, 31 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes! Worse: if you don't want to give out the information your server could easily just give out false information. That would plug the potential security whole and follow the recommendation for network testing facilities at the same time. (BRB w/How do I hack my fingerd.exe to lie?)


 * (From the RFC) "Like Telnet, FTP and SMTP, Finger is one of the protocols at the security perimeter of a host. Accordingly, the soundness of the implementation is paramount. The implementation should receive just as much security scrutiny during design, implementation, and testing as Telnet, FTP, or SMTP."


 * Now that we have HTTP it would seem that we have no need for any of these apparently insecure protocols which were once at our security perimeters other than as a challenge for an aspiring engineer (except for SMTP, but that is only used to exchange messages between Gmail and Facebook).


 * References to the worm should be removed from this article. The systems that were vulnerable were fixed, and that was old news when the RFC was last updated in 1991.


 * Fnordly (talk) 12:46, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

multiuser multitasking timeshare systems
finger started as a program to allow sharing a small amount of information between users of timeshared computers; that's a single computer not on a network, barely rising to the level of a "protocol". It's extension to networked computers was natural and obvious, but it's telling the story wrong to start with networks and just drop hints at what it actually was. And "to finger" someone is old and current slang for making an accusation, despite what this article currently says. 98.7.201.234 (talk) 20:30, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

RFC1918 Incompatibility?
`The finger protocol is also incompatible with Network Address Translation (NAT) from the private network address ranges (e.g. 192.168.0.0/16) that are used by the majority of home and office workstations that connect to the Internet through routers or firewalls nowadays.` Can someone provide more information or a link to this? I almost feel like a "citation needed" is needed - 2602:30A:C07E:99B0:6973:7F81:B929:CB3B (talk) 16:27, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Incompatible Timesharing System -- ITS finger
FINGER was not originally a protocol. FINGER did not come from UNIX, it was re-implemented on UNIX. This WP article is based on misconceptions.

The 3BSD UNIX finger.c source code says it is reminiscent of finger on ITS. * There are three output formats, all of which give login name, teletype * line number, and login time. The short output format is reminiscent * of finger on ITS

Jamplevia (talk) 14:42, 17 October 2023 (UTC)

unnecessary "Internet protocol suite"
Is it really helpful (or confusing) for the box on the right to include All that information about Internet protocol suite.

I'd like to remove it next time I'm around. DGerman (talk) 18:15, 22 February 2024 (UTC)