Unix - Miscellaneous Commands

Who's Who?

If you wish to check that a username does belong to the person that you wish to communicate with you can use the finger command. For example:

Type: finger abc1
Response:
Login name: abc1                 in real life: DR. R.J. Mobbs
Office: Comp Centre,  x2247
Directory: /diak/v/abc1            Shell: /bin/ksh
Last login at Mon Nov  4 15:51 FROM UNKNOWN@hawk
No Plan.

To find the username of someone you know uses the irix service you can use the above command as follows:

Type: finger surname

What Time is it?

To show the current date and time on the terminal screen:

Type: date
Response: Fri Sep 01 12:04:26 GMT 1995

This date command has several options which allows different parts of this output to be displayed. For example:

Type: date +%d/%m/%y
Response: 01/09/95
Type: date +%j
Response: 243 (number of days since the beginning of the year)

Source: http://www.le.ac.uk/oerresources/bdra/unix/page_50a.htm