Funny thing: finger and .plans were what you are doing. Twitter is what you are ...

ucs · on Sept 25, 2016

Funny thing: finger and .plans were what you are doing. Twitter is what you are doing.

Even more apropos was finger's .project file: it was meant to be a single-line status update about your current project.

nandhp · on Sept 25, 2016

Well, there's always something like this Finger-to-Twitter proxy:

https://gist.github.com/mcroydon/519344

AckSyn · on Sept 25, 2016

but then i'd have to use node.js

nandhp · on Sept 26, 2016

True. So maybe it would be better to stick this one-liner in your inetd.conf.

    perl -MLWP::Simple -MCGI=escape -MHTML::Entities -MEncode -e '$u="";read(STDIN,$u,1,length($u)) while length($u)<128 and $u!~/\n/;$u=~s/^\/w//i;$u=~s/\s//g;if(!$u){print "This server cannot enumerate users.\r\n";exit}elsif(length($u)>128){exit}elsif($u=~/@/){print "Finger forwarding denied.\n";exit}foreach (split /\r?\n/,get("https://twitrss.me/twitter_user_to_rss/?user=".escape($u))) { if(/<title>([^<]+)/){$title=decode_entities($1)}elsif(/<dc:creator>.*\(@([^)<]+)\)/){$author=decode_entities($1)}elsif(/<\/item>/){print encode("utf8","$author: $title\r\n")}}'

On the bright side, Finger is a simple enough protocol you can implement a full-featured RFC1288-compliant server (except for some optional features) in under 600 characters. Remind me again why nobody uses it anymore?

AckSyn · on Sept 26, 2016

That's one heck of a 1-liner! I like it.

>. Remind me again why nobody uses it (finger) anymore?

People wanted "shiny" for their things.

petercooper · on Sept 25, 2016

The protocol is so simple and the client so pervasive (it's even on Windows by default) that you could still do something semi-interesting with it today, I reckon (for command line dwellers only though, it's just as easy to hit a URL and get some text back..)