[18008] in Athena Bugs
Problem with finger
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex Coventry)
Mon Jul 17 17:46:08 2000
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 17:46:03 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200007172146.RAA209896@w20-575-116.mit.edu>
From: Alex Coventry <alex_c@MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@mit.edu
This is really driving me nuts:
> athena% finger alex_c@mit.edu
> [mit.edu]
> Student data loaded as of Jun 8, Staff data loaded as of Jul 15.
> URL data loaded once a month.
>
> Notify Personnel or use WebSIS as appropriate to change your information.
>
> Our on-line help system describes
> How to change data, how the directory works, where to get more info.
> For a listing of help topics, enter finger help@mit.edu. Try finger
> help_about@mit.edu to read about how the directory works. Please see
> help_url@mit.edu for questions about the new URL field.
>
> There was 1 match to your request.
>
> name: Mevay, Alex C H
> email: mevay@PO8.LOCAL,
> phone: (617) 225-6356
> address: East Campus, Walc # 311
> department: Electrical Eng & Computer Sci
> school: School Of Engineering
> year: 4
> alias: A-mevay
There's only one problem -- my name's not Mevay, it's Coventry.
However, my username is alex_c. My understanding is that this bug
occurs because finger interprets underscores as spaces, and tries to
find a match to 'alex c' in its database. This differs from the
standard behaviour of finger, and is very confusing to people who are
not used to it. The problem has already bitten me twice. I don't
really want to have to send a warning with every email and newsgroup
post I make that MIT's finger is broken.
I talked to some people in SIPB about this, and they said that I'm
basically screwed, as the people who are responsible for finger's
behaviour are notoriously unresponsive to bug reports. I hope that's
not the case, but if it is, and the source code of the relevant program
is publically available and written in C/C++, then I could spare a
little time to write a patch myself. Patching it to default to the
standard behaviour of initially checking whether or not there is an
exact match between the finger request and the usernames would certainly
solve my problem, although I'm not sure what other problems it might
introduce.
Alex.
