From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Apr 28 20:20:12 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from kiwi.pinnacle.co.nz (pinnacle.internet.co.nz [210.48.55.133]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A27621524F for ; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 20:20:07 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jonc@pinnacle.co.nz) Received: from kiwi.pinnacle.co.nz (kiwi.pinnacle.co.nz [202.37.163.2]) by kiwi.pinnacle.co.nz (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id PAA06519; Thu, 29 Apr 1999 15:16:11 +1200 (NZST) Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1999 15:16:11 +1200 (NZST) From: Jonathan Chen To: Dima Dorfman Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ghost user? In-Reply-To: <199904290208.TAA88885@unixfreak.org> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message