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

From: Vincent Lefevre <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:09:22 +0100

On 2025-02-17 10:39:09 +0100, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
> "who -d" shows which login processes exit without removing the utmp
> entry and where the init process cleaned up the utmp entry instead.
> Since no terminal is controlled by an init process, you should never
> see any terminal listed. So I have my doubts that you ever saw there
> terminal processes. And if yes, something was terrible broken with
> your init and login process.

This is shown at least for xterm processes that have terminated
and for closed SSH sessions.

> > "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.
> 
> Yes, and this feature never worked reliably if I look at all the old
> bug reports for openSUSE.

It seems to be reliable for xterm and SSH sessions (not for GNU Screen
unfortunately).

> This "feature" is very terminal centric and stopped already working
> when people decided to use graphical applications and not terminals.

But the goal is to use this for terminals only.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <[email-masked]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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