Ruario's Journal [extract]

2023-01-19

20:54 +0100

The finger protocol support really is universal.

On Windows and macOS the finger command is already installed by default. Just fire up a terminal and you are good to go. It is also present on many (most?) Linux distros in the default setup and even when that isn't true, it's typically a simple install command away. But actually, you may not even need to install it, since it is such a basic protocol it is easily simulated with other common networking tools. So you could for example just use netcat like so

$ echo ruari | nc plan.cat 79

Or telnet

$ (echo ruari; cat -) | telnet plan.cat 79

In addition, despite the fact that I said just the other day that curl does not support the finger protocol (§ 2023-01-10 20:22 +0100), that does not mean you can't actually use it to get information over finger! 😉

Just use it's telnet support as a workaround, like so

$ echo ruari | curl telnet://plan.cat:79

Finally, if you happen to have the command line browser Lynx installed, this can also handle the finger protocol, either like so

$ lynx finger://ruari@plan.cat

Or if you prefer

$ lynx finger://plan.cat/ruari

And what about mobile, you might ask? Ok, perhaps that one is more tricky but you could always install Lagrange! 😉

=> Lagrange (also Gemini and Gopher)

P.S. Let me know if I missed anything!

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