Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU!mouse
From: mouse@LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: A "fix" for wall.
Message-ID: <8903300011.AA29356@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Date: 30 Mar 89 00:11:14 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 23

>> If you look in Sun's /usr/include/utmp.h you find a define for
>> nonuser() used to determine if a pty entry in utmp corresponded to a
>> "real" user or not (i.e. someone who should get a wall message).

> Can you achieve the same effect (i.e., avoiding unwanted "wall"
> messages) by starting xterm with the -ut option to prevent it from
> writing a record in utmp?

Presumably.  But then lots of things don't work from xterm windows:
anything depending on getlogin(), for example.  A better solution, from
this point of view, would be to hack xterm to give it an option to
leave the host field blank in the utmp entry it writes.

While we're on the subject of xterm's utmp entries....there's a bug
somewhere, in that it confuses two users with the same UID: it will
always put the same one into utmp, regardless of which one runs xterm.
(This doesn't bother me enough to make me fix it, because there are
enough other things wrong with xterm to make me write my own anyway. :-)

					der Mouse

			old: mcgill-vision!mouse
			new: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu