1845830 Members
3026 Online
110250 Solutions
New Discussion

Who command problem

 

Who command problem

Hi all,

we used to manage user maximum sessions allowed by using "who command".

Some of our users .profile scripts manage user sessions with a command line similar to this atached:

taller='who|cut -c1-6|grep taller|wc -l'

We discover today that some user sessions are not reported by who command... i.e. whe launched 3 taller user sessions and "who" reports only one line containing info about taller.

Can anyone help? This mechanism is working for a few years (5) without a problem.

HPUX version is 10.20.

Thanks.
5 REPLIES 5
AshishJain_USA
Frequent Advisor

Re: Who command problem

Some smart user may have manipulated their .profile file.

Re: Who command problem

.profile is ok without manupulations.

Thank you
A. Clay Stephenson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Who command problem

Your utmp and/or wtmp files are probably corrupt. You could try to export/import them using fwtmp and clean them up or simply null the files. Man fwtmp for details.
If it ain't broke, I can fix that.
Geoff Wild
Honored Contributor

Re: Who command problem

Instead of cut, use awk

'who|awk '{print $1}'|grep taller|wc -l'


What about using last?

last |grep logged |grep taller |wc -l

Rgds...Geoff
Proverbs 3:5,6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make all your paths straight.

Re: Who command problem

Clay:

So I can reset utmp file with a simply echo > /etc/utmp?
From the moment utmp is null, who does not return any value until some user log into the system?

Geoff:

'who|awk '{print $1}'|grep taller|wc -l'

It won´t because who returns only a taler user line.

What about using last?
ast |grep logged |grep taller |wc -l

I guess it could work.

Thanks