a .plan question..

[Frank Peters]

: On 28 Jan 91 23:38:21 GMT, jkonrath at silver.ucs.indiana.edu (jon) said:

jkonrath> dumb question from a non-wizard:
jkonrath> anyone know a way to run a program from a .plan? it needs to be run at the
jkonrath> time of the finger, and run by the fingeree.
jkonrath> the program is to see who is doing the fingering, then put their name in
jkonrath> a log. any way to do this in this method? i saw it done a while back, but
jkonrath> it couldve been some method of running a background program to constantly

It is certainly possible.  The trick is to make .plan a type of
special file called a FIFO (First In First Out).  Your process then
waits for someone to read from .plan and then writes to it. This is
actually very easy to do.  I wrote a quick hack to do it the last time
this thread came around.  Write to me if you want a copy.

There are a few gotchas and limitations to be aware of:

1)  The only real way to find out who is fingering you is to lok for
the process that is doing it.  That means that this will only work for
local fingerers.  The finger protocol doesn't tell you who is
fingering you from a remote host.

2)  If the finger server isn't running then when the process opens the
.plan file it just hangs.  This can lead to a few seized up fingerd
processes.

3)  If your home directory is shared among several machines things
will lock up if anyone fingers you on any machine but the one the
server is running on.  This is really a special case of item 2.

Regards,
FWP

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Frank Peters   Internet:  fwp1 at CC.MsState.Edu         Bitnet:  FWP1 at MsState
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