[Terretta]

Roughly, the .plan or .project file from finger?

In Unix, finger is a program you can use to find information about computer users. It usually lists the login name, the full name, and possibly other details about the user you are fingering. These details may include the office location and phone number (if known), login time, idle time, time mail was last read, and the user's plan and project files. The information listed varies, and you may not be able to get any information from some sites.

In some cases, you may be able to use the finger command to verify an address or find more information for someone at another institution about whom you already have some information. The finger command is available on most Unix systems. It differs from the whois command, which you can use simply to find the email address of someone at another institution.

To use finger, at your Unix prompt, enter:

    finger [e-mail]

Replace node.domain with the appropriate machine and domain address, and username with the name of the person or the person's username, for example:

    finger [e-mail]

See: https://kb.iu.edu/d/aasp

[kzhahou]

I think you're being DV'd because people think you're saying "this is just finger." But I think you're actually reminding people of that old service, which won't be familiar to newer generation, and was ubiquitous back in the day.

[achillean]

And there are still 4,000+ servers running it publicly:

https://www.shodan.io/report/ohcbBDbi

For comparison: finger[1] is more common on the Internet than Apache Cassandra[2].

[1] https://www.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A79+idle

[2] https://www.shodan.io/search?query=product%3Acassandra

[adiabatty]

A bunch of game developers had .plan files back in the late 90s, but we Windows users had to visit a third-party site to view John Carmack's .plan because Windows didn't have a finger client.

This is better than finger in some ways — it's not multiline-capable as written, but at least clients can consume .txt files with near-universal tools (web browsers).

[gknoy]

I still remember reading John Carmack's _amazingly_detailed_ and interesting .plan files back when I was in college.