finger anomalies

Sun Sep 23 07:48:57 AEST 1990

Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc
Subject:finger anomalies
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References: <1990Sep19.215622.15073 at hq.demos.su> <1990Sep20.124422.5930 at robobar.co.uk> <1990Sep20.132235.911 at hq.demos.su> <8552 at ncar.ucar.edu> <1990Sep20.164828.2391 at hq.demos.su> <8559 at ncar.ucar.edu> <1990Sep21.091537.7858 at hq.demos.su>
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Reply-To: leung at ee.rochester.edu (Chinman Leung)
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Organization: University of Rochester Department of Electrical Engineering
Keywords: FINGER

When I use the command 'finger' in my shell script,  I discover a weird problem
The thing is whenever finger cannot find a certain host it returns unknown
host on the standard output rather than on diagnostic output and the status
is 0 signifying a success operation.  I really feel bothered by it.
Can someone explain?