earle@smeagol.UUCP (01/28/87)
In article <12057@sun.uucp>, guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes: > > But I do wish DEC would give it a go along the same lines, with Ultrix. > > Maybe the day will come when the following line disappears from finger(1) : > > > > "The encoding of the gcos field is UCB dependent - it knows > > that an office '197MC' is '197M Cory Hall', and that '529BE' > > is '529B Evans Hall' " > > The problem here is not with the manual, the problem is with the > program; the correct fix is to take that silly localism out of the > program if it's to be distributed as part of anything more formal > than a BSD release. The code, and the comment in the manual page, > are certainly gone from *our* release. Unfortunately, whomever removed the code did it via the "slash-and-burn" method. *All* usage of the GECOS field got wiped out! Personally, every one that I have talked to can't understand why Sun changed the last field of the finger output to `Where', and only uses it to display remote hostnames for users logged in remotely. We don't care about the Berkeley localisms, either, but having the last field be `Office', displaying office location and office phone (like BSD) seems much more useful, in our opinion. (I don't consider office phone/location to be useless, even in an Internet environment; one could still get an area code easily, and a main number for an organization after which one could use the office extension given by `finger') Slash-and-burn probably explains why there is no `chfn' in Sun OS 3.2, since the info isn't used. -- Greg Earle UUCP: sdcrdcf!smeagol!earle; attmail!earle JPL ARPA: elroy!smeagol!earle@csvax.caltech.edu AT&T: +1 818 354 4034 earle@jplpub1.jpl.nasa.gov (For the daring) Should I start with the time I SWITCHED personalities with a BEATNIK hair stylist or my failure to refer five TEENAGERS to a good OCULIST?
mangler@cit-vax.UUCP (02/08/87)
In article <797@smeagol.JPL.NASA.GOV>, earle@smeagol.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle) writes: > [...] can't understand why Sun changed the last field > of the finger output to `Where', and only uses it to display remote hostnames > for users logged in remotely. For hardwired terminals, why not display the terminal location in this field? I suggest this because cit-vax has a file /etc/ttywhere containing this information, a holdover from long ago, when someone might have actually implemented this. Don Speck speck@vlsi.caltech.edu {seismo,rutgers,ames}!cit-vax!speck
guy@gorodish.UUCP (02/09/87)
>For hardwired terminals, why not display the terminal location in this field?
The 4.3BSD manual page for TTYS(5) says:
If the line ends with a comment, the comment is included in
the "ty_comment" field of the ttyent structure.
and, in the examples it gives, shows office names in the comment
fields on some lines. (S5 uses a similar hack; if the command line
on an "/etc/inittab" entry contains a comment, the text of the
comment is printed by "who" for that line.) The 4.3BSD "finger"
doesn't use this, but it's a (fairly) simple change to make "finger"
use it.