Re: Pinky command

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > Why the name of command was changed from "finger" to "pinky"? I
   > liked new name, but there may be Some old scripts (copied from
   > Unix to Linux) in which finger may have used.  I suggested finger
   > as a link to pinky.

   As far as I know pinky is not a replacement for finger but is instead
   a lightweight version of it.  On my Debian system I have both a
   'finger' command and a 'pinky' command and the output is not identical
   between them.  Although they are very similar.

Pink just reads utmp, while finger connects either to a local deamon
or a remote one and does a similar task (pinky will not show when you
mail spool was updated for example).  The difference (in short) is
that pink is a local command, and finger is a remote one.  Both do a
similar task, but very the implementation is very different, finger
works over TCP/IP and can probe a remote host about a user, while pink
does not.

   Most software distributions that include finger include one of the
   free versions such as the BSD netkit one.  Here is one such:

I really need to take time to implement finger for inetutils, so GNU
and its variants do not need to use netkig! :-)