selig@golem.msfc.nasa.gov (Bill Selig - SysAdmin) (11/15/89)
About every 3-7 months here we have a case where the wtmp file gets scrod
and the output of the 'last' command looks REAL WIERD. This gets caused by
extra characters in the wtmp file. I have never figured out where this
comes from, but I did get aggravated enough the second time it happened to
write a bit of code to automatically fix the problem. I submit this to the
general community in case others have been hassled by this.
Usage method is: fixwtmp infile [outfile]
It will read the infile, print to stdout the results of its analysis and
corrections, and optionally write to an output file.
I typically do
'fixwtmp /var/adm/wtmp fw >results'
followed by
'last -f fw'
to check out the process. If the 'last' check looks ok, I copy (as root)
fw back to /var/adm/wtmp (making sure that no log{in,out}s have occured
since I started).
Ed's Note: placed in archives
FTP Hostname : titan.rice.edu (128.42.30.1)
Directory: sun-source
Filename : fixwtmp.c
Archive Server Address: archive-server@rice.edu
Archive Server Command: get sun-source fixwtmp.c