● Code · Sunday, March 2, 2014

Personal Finger Daemon for Windows

By Robert Ellison. Updated on Sunday, April 26, 2026

finger

Did you know that Windows still has a vestigial finger command with just about nothing left to talk to? One of my New Year's resolutions is to bring finger back and unlike the stalled webfinger project I need to make some progress. Here's some C# to run your own personal finger daemon... you just need to create a .plan file in your home directory (haven't done that for a while):

using System; using System.Diagnostics; using [System.IO](http://System.IO); using [System.Net](http://System.Net); using [System.Net](http://System.Net).Sockets; using System.Text; using System.Threading; namespace fingerd { static class Program { private const int FingerPort = 79; private const int MaxFingerCommand = 256; private const string PlanFile = ".plan"; private static readonly TcpListener _tcpListener = new TcpListener( IPAddress.Any, FingerPort); static void Main() { _tcpListener.Start(); while (true) { TcpClient tcpClient = _tcpListener.AcceptTcpClient(); Thread clientThread = new Thread(ClientThread); clientThread.Start(tcpClient); } } static void ClientThread(object client) { NetworkStream clientStream = null; TcpClient tcpClient = client as TcpClient; if (tcpClient == null) { return; } try { byte[] command = new byte[MaxFingerCommand]; clientStream = tcpClient.GetStream(); int read = [clientStream.Read](http://clientStream.Read)(command, 0, command.Length); if (read == 0) { return; } ASCIIEncoding asciiEncoding = new ASCIIEncoding(); string commandText = asciiEncoding.GetString(command); int endOfCommand = commandText.IndexOf("\r\n", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase); if (endOfCommand <= 0) { return; } string user = commandText.Substring(0, endOfCommand); if ([string.Compare](http://string.Compare)(user, Environment.UserName, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) != 0) { return; } string planPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetFolderPath( Environment.SpecialFolder.UserProfile), PlanFile); if (!File.Exists(planPath)) { return; } string plan = File.ReadAllText(planPath) + "\r\n"; byte[] planBytes = asciiEncoding.GetBytes(plan); clientStream.Write(planBytes, 0, planBytes.Length); } catch (Exception ex) { Debug.WriteLine(ex); } finally { if (clientStream != null) { clientStream.Close(); } tcpClient.Close(); } } } }

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