Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 15:16:11 +1200 (NZST) From: Jonathan Chen <jonc@pinnacle.co.nz> To: Dima Dorfman <dima@unixfreak.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ghost user? Message-ID: <Pine.SC5.4.10.9904291509470.6301-100000@kiwi.pinnacle.co.nz> In-Reply-To: <199904290208.TAA88885@unixfreak.org>
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On Wed, 28 Apr 1999, Dima Dorfman wrote:
> hi, today, when i did a w(1), i noticed that i have a user logged on, but
> they aren't running anything. for example:
>
> geoffrey ph localhost 6:38PM 26 -
>
> that is part of the w(1) output. when i do ``ps ajfxU geoffrey'', ps
> reports that they aren't running anything.
>
> why does this happen? and how can i log them out? usually, to log out a
> user, i would kill their shell, but they aren't running a shell!
This sometimes happens when a line gets disconnected. The utmp entry
just hasn't been cleared out correctly. It shouldn't affect your
system at all - the line *is* free, and will be reused.
This happens on SCO machines quite a lot, and I've got a program lying
around somewhere that you can run as root that will clear out dead
entries in the utmp file. It should compile on FreeBSD with some or no
tweaks - email me if you'd like it.
Jonathan Chen
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