special files as .plans?

[GarBear Irick]

Along these lines, I noticed a STRANGE thing today:

   ln -s /dev/tty .plan

When I finger myself (OUCH!), it echoes back from stdin.  If someone ELSE
fingers me from the same host, it just kinda hangs until they <CTRL>-<C>
out of it.  Not sure what it does from remote sites....(telnet HOST 79
from here results in:  No Plan.)  Kind of a nice hack to annoy people who
finger you, and kinda weird...  If fingerd runs as root, does this mean
that I should, in theory, be able to ln -s /dev/CONSOLE!!! .plan and have at
it??  If so, isn't this BAD?  :9  Do all fingers run like this, or is it just 4.3BSD, or just a Purdue-ism?   Just curious....


-- 
Gary A. Irick,  Purdue University |
INTERNET: irick at en.ecn.purdue.edu |
UUCP:     ...!pur-ee!irick        |