Subject: bug#73928: Bug#1080330: coreutils: who no longer works

From: Vincent Lefevre <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2025 10:25:20 +0100

On 2025-02-17 08:03:23 +0100, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
> Some terminal applications (e.g. xterm, konsole, ...) create fake utmp
> entries for historic reasons: so that broadcast messages are shown in
> every single terminal. Which for people, who only work with graphical
> applications, but not terminals, is not from help, as they will never
> see them.

No, there may be other uses. For instance, "who -d" reports
information about dead terminal processes. Obviously, this is
not for broadcast messages (more for debugging purpose, IMHO).
However, for xterm at least, the output information is incorrect
(term & exit values are always 0).

"who -u" also reports useful information, such as the idle time
and the PID of the terminal process. The absence of utmp completely
breaks this feature.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <[email-masked]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)