Finger

The finger dialog allows you to finger a person's address to find out more information about them.

If a user has a personal email/machine address, this will only work if they are running a finger server. Most other addresses eg. school, government, etc. can usually be fingered successfully, though they will not necessarily give you any useful information. For some users this can be a way of checking if they have mail.

You can also type /finger <nick/address> at the command line.

If there's a . in the parameter you provide then it assumed to be an address and is immediately fingered, otherwise it is assumed to be a nickname, so mIRC looks up the user's address with a /userhost and then fingers that address.

Finger Server

mIRC has a built-in finger server which listens for finger requests on port 79.

Enable finger server

This turns on the finger server.

Show finger requests

If this is turned on, finger requests are displayed in the status window.

Finger file

You can specify a finger file, which must be a plain text file, and this must be set up with named sections which will be used to reply to any finger requests. Each section begins in the following way:

[name]

line1

.

.

.

lineN

The section name corresponds to the userid that is being fingered. eg. if someone fingers khaled@mirc.com, then I will have a section named [khaled].

There should be at least one section named [default] which will be used to reply to a finger request which does not specify a user, or specifies a user that doesn't exist.

Therefore, for my own system I would have two sections:

[default]

etc.

[khaled]

etc.

This can, for example, allow you to setup a menu system, with various sections that can answer user finger queries, the default section being the main menu.

If you want identifiers or variables in a line in the finger text file to be evaluated, you must prefix the text line with a $ character.