russo@chaos.utexas.edu (Thomas Russo) (01/18/90)
Is there any way to clean out lists of DEAD_PROCESSes from /etc/utmp so that commands like who am i and talk work correctly? Let me be more specific. who -a shows (for example): ... rlogin ttyq14 Jan 17 10:52 0:42 21114 id= q14 term=0 exit=0 ... russo ttyq14 Jan 17 11:05 0:01 20529 so a who am I by russo on ttyq14 (an xterm window on an X terminal) shows rlogin ttyq14 ... and if I say talk user then user gets a message "...talk from user rlogin " or some such garbage. This kind of thing happens all the time around here, and seems to be tied to unusual exits from xterm, but actually I can't reproduce it on demand. All I'd like is an easy way to fix it up, preferably without writing a program to monkey with /etc/utmp myself. There is another /etc/utmp anomaly I'd like to figure out: frequently if a remote user does an ftp to our machine and then lets the thing time out we get a ghost user in all subsequent whos. This persists, of course, until system reboot time (we take the system down once a week for backups). Any neat way to clean them up? Thomas Russo Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Texas at Austin russo@chaos.utexas.edu or phib421@utchpc.bitnet ------