Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!chaos.utexas.edu!russo
From: russo@chaos.utexas.edu (Thomas Russo)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: DEAD_PROCESSes in /etc/utmp and the who am i command
Message-ID: <23301@ut-emx.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jan 90 17:38:26 GMT
Sender: news@ut-emx.UUCP
Reply-To: russo@chaos.utexas.edu (Thomas Russo)
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of Texas at Austin, Center for Nonlinear Dynamics
Lines: 39

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
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