UNIX Whitepages Command

Taking the place of the old finger command, whitepages is used to display information about a system user. The syntax is:

whitepages [-l] user

User in this case can either be a user's real name (first or last) or their Unix username. For example, if you enter any of these commands:

whitepages jbrandt
whitepages brandt
whitepages joshua

Whitepages will include this record in what it returns:

cn: Joshua Thompson Brandt
sn: Brandt
ou: Computing and Communications Center
uid: jbrandt
mail: jbrandt@WPI.EDU
telephoneNumber: +1 508-831-5512
eduPersonPrimaryAffiliation: staff
eduPersonPrincipalName: jbrandt@WPI.EDU
eduPersonAffiliation: staff
wpieduPersonOffice: Fuller Labs 212
labeledURI: http://users.wpi.edu/~jbrandt
eduPersonOrgDN: dc=WPI,dc=EDU
eduPersonOrgUnitDN: cn=Computing and Communications Center,ou=Departments,dc=WPI
,dc=EDU
title: Sr UNIX System Administrator

Note that searching for partial usernames does NOT work, though searching for partial names may. (In this case, for instance, searching for jbrand would return no results, because it is a partial username. Searching for brand, however, would return the desired record, because it is part of the user's actual name.) If you want to search for a person solely by username, you can use the -l flag.

Whitepages will return different amounts and types of information depending on what type of user the person is as well as what information the person has chosen to share with the WPI community. Also, the amount of information you see will be limited if you do not have a Kerberos ticket cached. (To remedy this, type kinit and enter your Unix password.) All of the same information may be found by using the web interface on the Campus Directory page.

Maintained by itweb.
Last modified: Mar 11, 2005, 20:24 UTC