Who's out there?

To look for a user, you can use the command

zlocate username

which will either give you the name of the machine the user is logged in on, or tell you that the user is Hidden or not logged-in. The second message indicates that the user is either not logged in, or is not subscribing to Zephyrgrams, or does not want to be zlocated.

If you want to check whether a whole list of people are logged in, you can use the znol command. First, you need to create a file called .anyone in your home directory. This file should contain a list of the usernames of all the people you want to look for, with one username on each line. Then, you can use the command

znol

at your athena% prompt. You will see a list of all the people in your .anyone file who are logged in.

The znol command will also allow you to get Zephyrgrams announcing when people in your .anyone file log in and log out, if they announce this information. If you want to only get a list of people logged in, without receiving login and logout Zephyrgrams, you can use znol -l instead. Similarly, you can use znol -q to only receive login and logout Zephyrgrams. Another useful option to znol is

znol -u username

which allows you to just check one username and get Zephyr messages when that person logs in and out. This differs from just zlocating that person because you will get login and logout Zephyrgrams. It can be done in addition to running znol normally, so you can basically add individual users to the list of people you want to check on without adding them to your .anyone file.

You can use the -f option to use a file other than .anyone as the list of people. For instance, you might list the usernames of members of a club in a file called .anyone.club, and check if any of them are logged in with znol -f /.anyone.club.