> Why the name of command was changed from "finger" to "pinky"? I > liked new name, but there may be Some old scripts (copied from > Unix to Linux) in which finger may have used. I suggested finger > as a link to pinky.
As far as I know pinky is not a replacement for finger but is instead a lightweight version of it. On my Debian system I have both a 'finger' command and a 'pinky' command and the output is not identical between them. Although they are very similar. Pink just reads utmp, while finger connects either to a local deamon or a remote one and does a similar task (pinky will not show when you mail spool was updated for example). The difference (in short) is that pink is a local command, and finger is a remote one. Both do a similar task, but very the implementation is very different, finger works over TCP/IP and can probe a remote host about a user, while pink does not. Most software distributions that include finger include one of the free versions such as the BSD netkit one. Here is one such: I really need to take time to implement finger for inetutils, so GNU and its variants do not need to use netkig! :-)
