6.5  PUTTING THE FINGER ON SOMEONE
 
Finger is a handy little program which lets you find out more about 
people on the Net -- and lets you tell others on the Net more about 
yourself. 

Finger uses the same concept as telnet or ftp. But it works with only one 
file, called .plan (yes, with a period in front).  This is a text file an 
Internet user creates with a text editor in his home directory.  You can 
put your phone number in there, tell a little bit about yourself, or 
write almost anything at all. 

To finger somebody else's .plan file, type this at the command line: 
 
     finger email-address
 
where email-address is the person's e-mail address.  If that person's 
site allows incoming finger requests (not all do), You'll get back a 
display that shows the last time the person was online, whether 
they've gotten any new mail since that time and what, if anything, is 
in their .plan file.

Some people and institutions have come up with creative uses for these 
.plan files, letting you do everything from checking the weather in 
Massachusetts to getting the latest baseball standings.  Try fingering 
these e-mail addresses: 
 
weather@cirrus.mit.edu            Latest National Weather Service weather 
                                  forecasts for regions in Massachusetts.
 
quake@geophys.washington.edu      Locations and magnitudes of recent 
                                  earthquakes around the world. 
 
jtchern@ocf.berkeley.edu          Current major-league baseball standings and 
                                  results of the previous day's games.
 
nasanews@space.mit.edu            The day's events at NASA.
 
coke@cs.cmu.edu                   See how many cans of each type of soda
                                  are left in a particular soda machine
                                  in the computer-science department of
                                  Carnegie-Mellon University.