The Name/Finger protocol is based on Request for Comments document RFC 742 (December 1977) as an interface to the name and finger programs that provide status reports on a particular computer system or a particular person at network sites.
Typically the server side of the protocol is implemented by a program fingerd or in.fingerd (for finger daemon), while the client side is implemented by the name and finger programs which are supposed to return a friendly, human-oriented status report on either the system at the moment or a particular person in depth.
The program would supply information such as whether a user is currently logged-on, e-mail address, full name etc.
[citation needed] Finger information has been used by hackers as a way to initiate a social engineering attack on a company's computer security system.
[citation needed] It is implemented on Unix (like macOS), Unix-like systems (like Linux and FreeBSD), and current versions of Windows (finger.exe command).