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Miscellaneous Finger techniques For The Web

For you low maintenance types, here are four different ways of building finger URLs that don't use a CGI or gateway of any sort.

If there's a trick I don't have listed here, just tell me about it.

The Finger URL

Contact: not applicable
Distribution Site: The expired Internet Draft describing the finger URL
Interactive Example: Not applicable.
Fixed Example: finger://world.std.com/kibo
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities? Yes.
Verbose Output? No.
Other Comments: The specification is underimplemented. To my knowledge, only EMACS-w3 (Gnuscape), and Lynx currently support it. Browsers that don't support the finger URL may do really stupid things -- if selecting the link above takes you to a page that says "Your browser is broken!", then your browser doesn't handle unknown URI schemes very well.

The Gopher URL

Contact: not applicable
Interactive Example: Not Applicable.
Fixed Example: gopher://world.std.com:79/0kibo
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities? Not Applicable (the output is returned as a text/plain gopher page, not an HTML page).
Verbose Output? No.
Other Comments: A "trick URL" (it takes advantage of the similarities between gopher and finger requests), can be used to finger someone using a gopher address, without having to depend on CGI or any special gateways. Odd as it seems, it doesn't even require the fingered computer to have a gopher server. Oliver Kiddle tells me that Netscape Navigator 2.01 refuses to access gopher through nonstandard ports, causing this URL to fail for Netscape users. (I discovered on my own that Mozilla also closes that port.) I suppose that's a pretty big problem, unless you want to Netscape-proof your pages. (I know I've considered it from time to time.)

Quake HQ (A cron(1)-based script) (DEFUNCT)

Contact: Patrick Steele <psteele@mail.msen.com>
Interactive Example: http://www.msen.com/~psteele/quake/finger.html
Fixed Example:
Preserves Whitespace? Yes.
Renders HTML? No.
Escapes Entities? Not Applicable (output is text/plain)
Verbose Output? Determined at run-time by author.
Other Comments: Patrick has a novel approach he uses to make specific .plan files (specifically those of everyone at Id Software) available on the Web. He uses cron(1) to finger the various Id accounts and copy the output to files that can be linked to like any other text file. (The Fixed Example URLs are from Patrick's Quake HQ server.)

Server-Side Includes

If, for some reason, you only need to display a site-wide finger for your web server's host computer, it can be done with a bit of HTML and a server-side include, if the web server's host machine has finger(1) installed locally. For example, this code:

<PRE>

<!--#exec cmd="finger"-->

</PRE>

produced this output:

Depending on your server's configuration, you might need to use the full path to the finger executable.