Manual

Finger is a service providing information about a user of a server. The finger-protocol is deactivated on the most Internet servers due to security reasons. So it makes especially sense for intranets and local host administration. The output of the finger command depends on the system and less standarized, because the output should be easy to read for humans and not for machines.

Net_Finger::query()

Net_Finger::query() – does a finger query

Synopsis

require_once 'Net/Finger.php';

string Net_Finger::query ( string $server , string $query )

Description

Execute a finger query on a server

Parameter

string $server - The name of the server or the IP-adress
string $query - The finger object to look up

Return value

string - the data from the finger request.

Throws

The returned PEAR_Error object in case of an error is unspecific, so you can ignore the error code and/or message. The reason for a failure could be a failed connection to the server or the server did not run a finger service.

You will not get a PEAR_Error, if the query fails due to a not existing finger object. This can be only done by checking the data returned by query().

Note

This function can be called statically.

Example

Using query()

<?php

$server = "localhost" ; // or IP adress to use
$query  = "ralph" ;     // Username to look up

$data = Net_Finger::query( $server, $query) ;
echo $data ; 

?>