Websnob > How to Finger Through a Web Page > CGI Scripts

CGI Scripts That Finger

Installing a CGI program on your local server is a bit more work than using a Finger gateway, but it's probably worth it in the long run, because you won't have to depend on somebody else maintaining the gateway indefinitely.

Please feel free to tell me about any finger(1) CGIs I've missed.

Doug's WWW Finger Gateway

See the review of Doug's WWW Finger Gateway on the Finger Gateways Page for details on getting the gateway's source code.

The GF script (DEFUNCT)

Contact: Jason Dour <jason++@dour.org>
Distribution Site: http://www.louisville.edu/~jadour01/mothersoft/gf/
Interactive Example: Not Applicable.
Fixed Example: http://www.louisville.edu/~jadour01/
Preserves Whitespace? Not Applicable.
Renders HTML? Not Applicable.
Escapes Entities? Not Appliable.
Verbose Output? Not Applicable.
Other Comments: GF is a "graphic finger" cgi script that must be integrated into a web page rather than run independently. When a GF'ed page is accessed, it will display a graphic indicating whether or not the page's owner is currently online.
gf has one major drawback -- although it includes ALT text for its images, but all it says is "gf-image", so the display is useless to readers using text-only browsers.
Jason Dour is apparently no longer maintaining gf Nowaday, most people use an ICQ status indicator for the same purpose.

The htmlfinger script by Boris Margolin (DEFUNCT)

Contact: Boris Margolin <boris@catch22.com>
Distribution Site: http://www.catch22.com/~boris/htmlfinger
Interactive Example: Not Applicable.
Fixed Example: Visit Boris Margolin's home page for a demonstration of htmlfinger.
Preserves Whitespace? Not Applicable.
Renders HTML? Not Applicable.
Escapes Entities? Not Applicable.
Verbose Output? Not Applicable.
Other Comments: This is one of (at least) two unrelated scripts with the same name. A non-graphical alternative to GF, this htmlfinger script is activated as a server-side include, and announces whether or not the page owner is online at the moment.

The htmlfinger script by John Dubois (DEFUNCT)

Contact: John DuBois no longer actively maintains this script.
Distribution Site: ftp://ftp.maths.nott.ac.uk/pub/personal/arf/htmlfinger-1.4.tar.gz
Interactive Example: Not Applicable.
Fixed Example: http://www.maths.nott.ac.uk/htbin-local/htmlfinger
Preserves Whitespace?
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities?
Verbose Output? Yes.
Other Comments: The first script named htmlfinger (I think), this cgi-script reads the /etc/passwd file of the site its run on, and builds an HTML list of all users who have fingerable .plan files, with hyperlinks to those .plan files. It has been superceded by the htmluser script. htmlfinger has to cover a lot of ground to detect all those .plan files; on systems with a lot of users, there'll be some waiting before htmlfinger displays its output. Also, when fingering an individual user, htmlfinger reformats the display into an non-standard, all-HTML format. That's not really a bug, but it's atypical.

The htmluser script (DEFUNCT)

Contact: John DuBois <john@armory.com>
Distribution Site: ftp://ftp.armory.com/pub/www/htmluser
Interactive Example: http://www.armory.com/cache/userinfo.html
Fixed Example: http://www.armory.com/cgi-bin/htmluser?john
Preserves Whitespace?
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities?
Verbose Output? Yes.
Other Comments: A successor to the original htmlfinger script, htmluser fingers the entire site its installed on, producing a list of users who have home pages and/or .plan files, along with mailto links for the users. It can also link directly to a user's .plan file. htmluser suffers the same "slow run" problems on a busy server that Dubois' htmlfinger does.

The NCSA finger script

Contact: cgi@ncsa.uiuc.edu is the official contact address for the NCSA script archive in general; I don't know how willing they are to handle questions about specific scripts.
Distribution Site: See "Comments"
Interactive Example: None available.
Fixed Example: None available.
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? Yes.
Escapes Entities? No.
Verbose Output? No. (Fixing that is easy; just add -l to the invoked finger command.)
Other Comments: A simple ISINDEX-using finger script is one of the sample scripts shipped with NCSA httpd, so even if you don't have a personal cgi-bin directory, your server may have a usable script installed in the public cgi-bin directory. (There are probably thousands of sites running this script.) Try this URL: http://(none)/cgi-bin/finger. If that example didn't work, either your system doesn't have the script installed, it's installed in an unusual place, your "browser host" isn't the same as your "server host", or your IP stack is unbelievably screwed up.

The Web Developer's Toolbox finger script

Contact: Jacqueline D. Hamilton <kira@metronet.com>
Distribution Site: Hmm, I seem to have lost this URL. Let me look for it before you bother Jacqueline.
Interactive Example: None available. (Apparently, even the writer doesn't use it anymore.)
Fixed Example: None available.
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities? No.
Verbose Output? No. (Fixing that should be easy; just add -l to the invoked finger command.)
Other Comments: More a proof of concept than anything, this is a very simple script showing how to dump the output of a UNIX command into a web page. In concept, it's not significantly different from NCSA's finger script.

Webfinger by Bruce Chang (DEFUNCT)

Contact: Bruce Shuling bschang@uclink2.berkeley.edu
Distribution Site: http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~bschang/webfinger2.cgi
Interactive Example: http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~bschang/webfinger2.cgi
Fixed Example:
Preserves Whitespace?
Renders HTML?
Escapes Entities?
Verbose Output?
Other Comments: Bruce Shuling Chang recently mentioned webfinger in a post to comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi as a work-in-progress. (The URL is actually the second version of the script.)