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Updating Finger Information

chfn is an acronym for change finger. This is a command that will allow you to change information about yourself that appears when people use the finger(1) command. The command allows you to change the fields that represent where your office is, your office phone number, and your home phone number.

When you run the chfn command, you will see the following three lines of information.

   Default values are printed inside of '[]'.
   To accept the default, type .
   To have a blank entry, type the word 'none'.

The first two lines tell you that if you want to accept whatever value appears in the [], press return. If you don't wish any information to appear in that field, or if the information doesn't apply to you, type "none". For example, if user foo wanted to change his finger information, he would do the following:

   % chfn
   Default values are printed inside of '[]'.
   To accept the default, type .
   To have a blank entry, type the word  none
   Room number (Exs: EE13 or POTR347) []:  MSEE 189
   Office Phone (Ex: 43366) []:  none
   Home Phone (Ex: 7421212) [7433000]:  

Resulting from the above action, user foo set his office room number to MSEE 189. Since he has no office phone number, he entered the word 'none'. And finally, he accepted the default value for his phone number.

The information given will be updated by the machine and will appear whenever anyone uses the finger(1) command. Sometimes when a machine is busy it may take 5 or 10 minutes for the updates to take effect, so don't worry, it will change. If user foo or someone else were to use the finger command later in the day, here's what would appear:

% finger foo
Login name: foo@In real life: foo bar
Office: MSEE 189@Home phone: 743-3000
Directory: /pizza/foo@Shell: /bin/pan
Affiliations: Pizza Hut, Veno's@Uid: 1234
Expires: December, 1990@Login group: fast-food (1)
Classification: Fast and Greasy
     
  Member of groups: pizza, toppings, fast-food

For more information read the online manual pages by typing "man chfn" and "man finger".

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