finger @@@@@@@@

[Dan Lanciani]

In article <968 at uhnix1.uh.edu>, mkkam at menkae.cs.uh.edu (Francis Kam) writes:
| I tried:
| 	% finger @@@@@@@@@@@@@
| on a sun 3/50 running SunOS4.0 and got as many finger processes running
| as the number of '@' at the command line.
| 
| That might not be a bug, but quite undesirable to me.

	If you find it undesirable, then don't type it.  Sorry, I couldn't
resist...  In any case, this is not a bug but a combination of two features.
For a long time the target of a remote finger could itself be a remote
finger.  This is extremely useful for getting to systems on different
networks, e.g., finger @oz at xx.lcs.mit.edu when oz was a real chaos net
host.  In Sun OS 4.0, the null hostname appears to be treated as the
local host so you see the @@@@ effect.  In any case, please don't
fix the former feature...

					Dan Lanciani
					ddl at harvard.*