I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
It used to be used all the time, but it's fallen out of favour. It's insecure, it was a plain-text client-server system so you could say finger ben@scramble.moopet.net or even just finger @scramble and it would interrogate the finger daemon on that host. If you set a file in your home directory called .plan it would display as part of the finger output:
$ finger teasmade@scramble.
Login: teasmade Name: Teasmade
Directory: /home/teasmade Shell: /bin/bash
Last login Mon Feb 15 10:53 2016 (EST) on pts/0 from x.x.x.x
No mail.
Plan:
Make tea
Benefits include being able to query remote hosts, and being able to control what people can see about you by editing files in your home.
There's also the last command, which will give a listing of who was logged in:
$ last
moopet pts/0 192.168.0.16 Sun Aug 4 19:20 - 19:21 (00:01)
moopet pts/0 192.168.0.16 Sun Aug 4 19:19 - 19:20 (00:00)
reboot system boot 5.2.5-arch1-1-AR Sun Aug 4 18:49 - 13:32 (10+18:43)
moopet pts/0 192.168.0.16 Sun Aug 4 17:40 - 17:40 (00:00)
moopet pts/0 192.168.0.16 Sun Aug 4 17:39 - 17:39 (00:00)
root tty1 Sun Aug 4 17:32 - 17:42 (00:09)
reboot system boot 5.2.5-arch1-1-AR Sun Aug 4 17:32 - 17:42 (00:09)
It used to be used all the time, but it's fallen out of favour. It's insecure, it was a plain-text client-server system so you could say
finger ben@scramble.moopet.net
or even justfinger @scramble
and it would interrogate the finger daemon on that host. If you set a file in your home directory called.plan
it would display as part of the finger output:There's a good overview of it here: computerhope.com/unix/ufinger.htm
Benefits include being able to query remote hosts, and being able to control what people can see about you by editing files in your home.
There's also the
last
command, which will give a listing of who was logged in:I see, "being able to query remote hosts" this would be useful in some cases, gonna read more on it, thank you Ben :D