On Sat, 18 Aug 2001, Thomas Mueller wrote:

> What is 'finger tknorris', and does it work when not connected to the
> Internet?

By default ("... displays information about the system users"), it looks
up users locally (without need of a RFC 1196 server); it just gets the
info from /var/run/utmp.

If you do not use "@host", then you do not need to have a finger service
listening.

The remote usage of finger is optional ("... may be used to look up users
on a remote machine") by using "user@host". (Then a RFC 1196 / fingerd
service needs to be listening.)

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/