Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!homxb!mhuxt!mhuxm!mhuxo!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!husc6!think!ames!aurora!labrea!decwrl!decvax!ima!minya!jc
From: jc@minya.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Arbitron "Users" count is very wrong under BSD
Message-ID: <454@minya.UUCP>
Date: 23 Jan 88 15:39:09 GMT
References: <15538@onfcanim.UUCP> <1978@s.cc.purdue.edu> <14258@oddjob.UChicago.EDU>
Organization: home
Lines: 30

In article <14258@oddjob.UChicago.EDU>, matt@oddjob.UChicago.EDU ("Don't even know my real name!") writes:
> Rock Wombat writes:
> 
> ) is there a general way to answer the question
> ) "How many active users does this machine have?" that avoids this difficulty?
> 
> How ubiquitous and uniform is /usr/adm/lastlog?
> 
Well, here there is no such file.  This machine is used by only two 
users, and we aren't interested in running accounting.  We have much
better uses for the cycles and disk blocks.  With the growth of the
workstation market, we will see more and more machines run like this. 
I've explained to quite a lot of users how to free up space and time 
on their workstations by eliminating all the stuff that makes sense
only on a multi-user system.

Perhaps we need mods to readnews, vnews, rn, and so on that keep a
file of readership history?  Well, actually, we don't; I've determined
the number of readers on several systems by something like:
	find /usr -name ".newsrc" -mtime -10 -print | wc -l
How's that for a cpu-gobbling solution?  Does anyone know an easy
way to produce a list of the home directories of all users?  Maybe
awk could be used to chew up /etc/passwd and spit out the fifth
field of each, "/.newsrc" could be appended to each, the mtime of
each could be tested, and so on.  Now if I only understood awk
well enough to get anything other than "bailing out near line 1"
98% of the time...

-- 
John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)