I have a couple of questions:

1.  What is the command that displays what other people are doing?
    It is something like "who" or "finger" but it also shows if the
    people logged on are in party, in conference, etc.

2.  What is the command to find out how many people are registered
    to a given conference?  I tried many variations of the following
    with no luck:  cat /etc/passwd | wc -1

Thanks

13 responses total.

1.  It sounds like you are referring to the 'w' command.

2.  Try the 'part' command in bbs.  From unix, you can run wc on the 
ulist file in each conference.  cat /etc/passwd | wc -1 will tell you how 
many accounts are on Grex, total.

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Really?  So what does the participants command do, look in every user's 
directory for a participation file?

Yep, that's exactly what it does.  You can see why it
takes so long, given that we have nearly 11,000 users
in /etc/passwd right now.

BTW, if you're using "w" for the specific purpose asked about, it's the
*shell* command, not the Picospan command you want.  If you're running it from
a bbs prompt ("Ok:" or "Respond or pass?"), do "!w" (without the quotes).

thanks, I'll play with those suggestions.

Re: #7 - that hint was what I needed - I knew it worked before, but I forgot
that it should be the shell command.

Re:  Counting participants within a conference - the following command 
     seems to work:  !locate photo.cf | wc -l

     I was using one (1) instead of ell (l)

     Thanks again.

When I use a shell command, using "!" what actually happens?  The reason I
am asking is I was telling someone about how to use internic to look up names
and I could not explain to him how to access that command from his webserver.

For most programs, entering "!" followed by a command tells
the program to spawn off a new copy of the shell program,
and run the command within that copy of the shell.
(Either that, or hitting "!" by itself spawns a new shell,
gives you a shell prompt, and lets you use the shell
interactively.)

I know that some sites won't let their users access the shell
directly, and disable the ! command from the various programs
they have.  Your friend should ask the sysadmins over there
whether he's allowed to run a shell program.

That is: there's a convention observed by a lot of Unix programs (& some in
some other environments, too) that says that a command prefixed by a bang is
a shell command.  Whether a particular program understands that convention
(or allows shell escapes if it understands them) is up for grabs.

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