Want to find out about the people logged on to your Linux computer? Well, don’t lift a finger; raise your pinky instead.
To discover some details about the people logged on to a Linux or Unix-like computer, many system administrators would likely turn to the finger command. Which is all well and good, but on many systems finger will be absent. It isn’t installed by default. You may well run across a system where this command is unavailable.
Instead of installing finger—assuming you have permission to do so—you can use pinky, a lightweight and modern version of finger. It was installed by default on all the Linux distributions tested during the research for this article, including Ubuntu, Manjaro, and Fedora.
A Delicate Touch
As you’d expect with a Linux command, pinky has its fair share of command line options (only two of which have names). But surprisingly, they all relate to pruning bits of information out of the reports that pinky produces. You can whittle the output down to include just the information of interest to you.
If pinky starts out as a lightweight, it can be positively featherweight by the time you’ve trimmed off the information you have no interest in.
Using pinky
The simplest way to use pinky is to type its name on the command line and hit Enter.
pinky
The default output is the “short format” report.
