Re: command "finger"

Robert M. Riches Jr. <spamtrap42@xxxxxxxxxxx> did eloquently scribble:
On 2008-02-26, moongeegee <moongeegee@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I used to issue the command "finger" to check who is on the system,
however, I could no longer to finger the users
who are on line. It only shows me root user even I run the finger
commend under my user account. Please see below.
Would anyone shed a light? Thanks

finger
Login Name Tty Idle Login Time Where
root root *:0 - Mon 17:37
root root pts/1 16:1

It's more likely someone can shed light on this if you'll
supply some more information:

What distribution and release are you using?

What "desktop" is in use?

How are the various users logging in? Is it xterms,
serial ttys, ssh sessions over ethernet, smoke signals,
...?

Some distributions apparently fail to record xterms into the
utmp or wtmp file that finger uses. Mandriva 2008.0 says
noone is logged in, while I am typing this with local X
running and four xterms open. When I used HatRed, sometimes
it would show xterms as login sessions and sometimes it
wouldn't.

Besides, if you're on the same system, the command "who" is far more
appropriate. Finger is only useful over a network and even then, can be
configured to not give much info for security reasons (which seems to be the
case here).
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