finger CGI Command

The finger gateway runs the finger program on a particular user producing a dynamic html document. A reference to user guest might look like this:
        <a href="/cgi-bin/finger?guest">finger me</a>
The text after the question mark specifies the argument to finger.

Here's the reference in real life: finger me

Finger does different things depending on whether you are talking to the internal webserver (http://web-int/) or the external webserver at http://www.cs.brown.edu/. Internally, the /cs/bin/f command is used, because it provides the best information.

On www.cs.brown.edu, the finger daemon on bullwinkle is queried. It supplies a filtered version of finger information, which affords local users some privacy.