On 2023-08-06 14:10, Thorsten Kukuk wrote:
On Sun, Aug 06, Paul Eggert wrote:
On 2023-08-06 13:00, Paul Eggert wrote:
How does "last" emulate /var/log/wtmp using systemd?
Oh, I see from <https://github.com/thkukuk/wtmpdb> that wtmpdb comes
with its own "last". Is the plan to migrate this code into util-linux
"last", or simply to kill off util-linux "last"? Similarly for
util-linux utmpdmp, procps "w", etc.
util-linux will merge lastlog2, I have no idea about wtmpdb, this wasn't
a topic yet before my vacation.
Does lastlog2 store only the last login of each user? If so, it won't
work for a command like "last eggert", which outputs all the times that
I've logged in since wtmp was rotated.
procps-ng kills reading files directly and will use systemd, patch got
accepted but not yet merged.
The current patches for util-linux do the same.
I haven't looked at the latest PR for shadow, but they planned the same.
So nobody seems to care about "backward compatibily" with a time
where tools like "last" did not yet exist.
Hmm, well I guess I care. (Call me an old-timer. :-) Admittedly I care
more about usage like "last eggert".
Also, the question about /var/adm/btmp remains.
Is there a use-case, for which it is __reliable__ useable?
I don't know what you mean by __reliable__. Certainly there are commands
that use /var/adm/btmp. util-linux's "lastb" command uses it, for
example. Will lastb stop working?
Until now, nobody could tell me one and nobody cared.
Perhaps you're not talking to the right people? I can find a reasonable
amount of discussion about this stuff. For example, even if we restrict
our attention to btmp, a Google search using the query "lastb btmp"
returned 68,200 results for me just now, with many results on
serverfault.com, stackexchange.com, linuxhint.com, etc.
