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 <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
