The who command

[Allen, Jack]

See below. 

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-install-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:redhat-install-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Mark
McCulligh
Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2006 3:10 PM
To: Getting started with Red Hat Linux
Subject: Re: The who command

Rick Stevens wrote:

>On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 13:55 -0400, Mark McCulligh wrote:
>  
>
>>Rick Stevens wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 11:55 -0400, Mark McCulligh wrote:
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>Hi Group,
>>>>
>>>>When I log into my system and run the who command I get no users. If
I 
>>>>look at my uptime is says 0 users. Plus if I view the lastlog file
it 
>>>>looks like it is corrupt.  How I am fix this?
>>>>   
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>"who" is based on what's in /var/log/utmp or /var/log/wtmp.  If one
of
>>>those files is not present, who can't report on users.  However,
>>>/var/log/wtmp is MANDATORY on Linux and is created by init if it does
>>>not exist.
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>I have tried using the root user. The wtmp file does exist but is 
>>blank.  Any ideas?
>>    
>>
>
>When you say "blank", what do you mean?  Remember that it's a binary
>file, so "cat" or "vi" are liable to spit out garbage or nothing.
>
>Can you post an "ls -l" of it?  It should look something like this:
>
>[root at prophead ~]# ls -l /var/log/wtmp
>-rw-rw-r--  1 root utmp 364416 Jun 27 15:42 /var/log/wtmp
>  
>
This is what I get:
[root at calonweb001 log]# lis -l /var/log/wtmp
-rw-rw-r--  1 root utmp 0 Jun  1 04:02 /var/log/wtmp

There is also a wtmp.1 file that also size 0.

Mark.

============
How much free space is there on the file system that has the utmp and
wtmp files? Some system use to keep the utmp and wtmp file in /etc and
later they were changed to symbolic links to other locations such as
/var/log. So some commands may look in the /etc directory and some
commands may look in /var/log. If the symbolic link has been deleted
then the data may be in /etc and the who command is looking in /var/log
for the files.


Jack Allen