The 90s Unix Utility That Fell Out of Favour | Hacker News Reader

The 90s Unix Utility That Fell Out of Favour

blog.alexellis.io

14 pointsalexellisuk16 comments

I think they mean, the 80s utility that fell out of favor through the 90s.

Those of us who were alive across both those times, 80s and 90s are not just interchangeable symbols denoting "before my time".

True - mistakenly wrote 90s as that's when I used it in my youth :)

In 1995-1196, I worked at an ISP. Our first step when trying to troubleshoot an access problem for a new user was to run the finger command on our server to see if the account had been provisioned yet.

30 years later, I still recall the time I had to calm down an angry customer after a frontline support tech told her that he was going to "finger her to find out what the problem is." He _really_ didn't think that one through!

And they say that developers are terrible at naming things lol.

Create your .plan and wall everyone now. ;P

In ye olden days, computers were more often multiuser, shared, and expensive servers. The computer lab at my university contained a pool of SGI, AIX, HP-UX, Sun SPARC, Linux, and SCO (but no IBM) boxes available over ssh via round-robin dns. The intent was to teach portable software engineering rather than tying things to a particular, proprietary platform. The trend towards so-called "hermetic toolchains" is absurd, anti-tinkering, anti-standards, and anti-portability depending on concealed, opaque binary blobs. Don't even get me started about bazel or systemd.

Finger is a stoneage network tool. Saying it fell out of favour is like saying bashing nuts between rocks fell out of favour.

I've known people who auto-populated their .plan with their recent tweets or Mastodon toots, and a special few that set it up so that updating their .plan auto-tweeted/tooted those thoughts.

I like that idea. Not dissimilar to the way GitHub now supports a "personal README" - I've seen it populated with generated graphics/charts/links etc.

Yeah, I especially look at simonw's Personal README [0] on GitHub sometimes and wonder if I should be doing more interesting automation with mine.

[0] https://github.com/simonw

(r)who, finger, talk - I remember having really nice gui wrappers for these that ran on XWindows and let you see who was online and chat with them.

      finger sdf.org

      finger london@graph.no

Nice.. like a kind of "teletext". The first finger didn't work.

I was bored on a flight with crap Internet and, like everyone else on that flight, entertained myself by reading random manpages on my Mac. I think I read the one for finger, and I think it's still from BSD4.4, as its last updated date is from 1993!

In other news, I was born too young to use finger, but I definitely used Hyper terminal on Windows which had a chat like console app that worked with it. (I think it's called CHAT.EXE; I wonder if Windows still includes it in their production images.)

I also still use w to see who's logged into stuff (useless on containers...but sometimes useful!) and the type command to print out definitions of functions from the absolute disaster that are my dotfiles (someday I'll clean them up!)

Author of the post here. The man pages on my Mac are also a hobby/pastime. It's funny the things you can learn from them.

Not to mention - vimtutor that's built in for extended periods of being offline like on a flight.

Why is a click bait headline necessary?

Your answer is embedded within your question. ;)

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