Where does mail info come from in finger ?

[Neil Rickert]

In article <1669 at fs1.ee.ubc.ca> tibors at ee.ubc.ca (tibor szikszai) writes:
>
>I looked at the source for finger, but I couldn't find anything that
>seems to be checking any files for whether the person being fingered
>has mail or not.  So I am curious about how things like "No unread
>mail." or "New mail received ...  Unread since ..." or "Mail last read ..."

  Not all fingers are created equal.  Some are more willing to intrude
on privacy than others.

>get printed.  Does anybody know?  Is another daemon doing this job?

 daemon ?  Do you mean you looked at fingerd sources?  Usually the fingerd
daemon merely invokes the local finger command and pipes the output back
to the network connection.  On a Sun, the output of 'strings /usr/ucb/finger'
contains '/usr/ucb/mail'.



-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert at cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940