number of users: what's the key?

Sebastien Braun sebb at yellowhippy.org
Tue Aug 23 20:15:56 UTC 2005


Hi all,

I have lurked this list for quite some time now, but thought I might be of 
help here, so I'll just chime in (english is not my native language, so 
forgive me if I misunderstood something):

Am Montag, 22. August 2005 21:20 schrieb Derek Broughton:
> Vram wrote:
> >
> > man who
> >
> > man users
>
> Not at all.  I know what they do - the question is why is a konsole
> terminal different from an xterm, for the purposes of who and users.

who and users do _not_ show you who is currently logged in. They are just 
programs for formatting /var/run/utmp in a readable way. They can also show 
you other files, namely /var/log/wtmp, which records past utmp entries.

For a program to be able to record its entries in utmp, root privileges are 
needed. kdm obviously has them, so does /sbin/login, which is responsible for 
the terminal logins. Konsole, however, does not. It relies on a daemon called 
utempter to do the utmp updating for it. I was not able to find utempter in 
apt, so chances are that ubuntu does not support konsole showing up in who.

Googling for utempter might turn up useful information.

Cheers,
Sebastien
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