logname: could not get login name

[Mauro Gatti]

Doing this command i get:

$ logname
logname: could not get login name

but if I do:
$ echo $LOGNAME
mgatt

I get my logname...

How can I fix the problem?

Thank You

[Steve Steel]

Hi

Do

tty

result is something like

/dev/ttyp1

name is ttyp1

Then

ll -i /dev/ttyp1 /dev/*/ttyp1

211202 crw--w---- 2 steves tty 17 0x000001 May 20 10:38 /dev/pty/ttyp1
211202 crw--w---- 2 steves tty 17 0x000001 May 20 10:38 /dev/ttyp1

If the inode numbers do not match then you need to remake your special files

Steve Steel

[Bill Hassell]

$LOGNAME is just an environment variable set when you first login. But logname is a system call to getlogin() which in turn reads the entries in /etc/utmp. /etc/utmp is a somewhat unstable file in that user programs are supposed to properly handle updates in this file. But crashed connections and other problems can leave orphaned entries in the utmp file thus creating the symptom you are seeing. You might is the command fwtmp to cleanup utmp and remove inconsistent entries, or just reboot and the file will be rebuilt.

[john korterman]

Hi Mauro,
if you execute
# who -u
is mgatt then currently logged on?

regards,
John K.

[Bill Douglass]

I've run into this when using logname and OpenSSH.

After adding the latest Quality Pak bundle for 11.0 (March 2003), I noticed that logname started failing for users connected via ssh.

Tracing the logname command, it appears that the updated binary adds calls to getsid(PID), which fail with EPERM or ESRCH errors. This causes logname to fail with the above error message.

whoami will return your effective username.

who am i | awk '{print $1}'
will return your real username (as determined from utmp).

[Ross Zubritski]

I have run into this after patching. Try an insf -e and see if that clears up your issue.

Regards,

RZ

[Richard Steenburg]

I had the same problem, but I couldn't not use logname b/c shareplex uses it all over the place. The problem has to do with process groups and setting UsePrivilegeSeparation to 'no' in the sshd_config file fixed made logname work again.

[Brian Crabtree]

You might want to verify that your user has the ability to read the /etc/passwd file. Try executing "id" and see if it returns your username.

Thanks,

Brian