Other Methods Finger. A program called finger is available on many computers directly connected to the Internet, and many people use it to find information about users on other computers. When you use finger, you have to know what computer the user is on. You do not, however, always have to know the exact login name of the user. You can usually use any part of the person's name, and finger will return essential data on all the users with that name on that computer.
Many organizations make their entire online directory available and searchable using finger.
You can also use finger to find out about all the users logged into a computer at any one time. To do this locally, just type finger . Unfortunately, finger isn't available on all computers, or it may be disabled for security reasons, so you can't depend on it to provide all the answers. One of the more obvious security reasons is that many people don't want others to know where they are or when they were on the computer last. As an aside, some organizations use finger to provide frequently updated information, such as the weather or daily headlines.