bogus tty entry

[Ralph W. Reid]

An incorrect user/tty combination is displayed by `who' on my system,
and I would like to remove it.  `who' indicates that I am logged in
on tty12 even when I am not.  If I do log in on tty12, I appear to be
logged in on that tty twice.  The bogus terminal usage has no
processes associated with it so there is nothing to kill that might
clear the problem up.

I suspect that I crashed something that has left an invalid entry in
/var/run/utmp, but I do not know how to remove the invalid entry from
the file.  I tried to write a little C program to remove the invalid
entry using `logout' as defined in /usr/include/utmp.h, but an error
during compilation-linking seemed to indicate that I needed to
include one of the many libraries (perhaps from /lib?) on this system
to get my little program to become a running executable.  Is there
some sort of program on Slackware 8.0 that might help me clear up
this little annoyance, or should I start trying to figure out which
library I need to link with my little program to deal with it?  I
would prefer not to reboot this system just to handle such a little
problem.  Thanks for any suggestions, and have a _great_ day!

-- 
Ralph.  N6BNO.  Wisdom comes from central processing, not from I/O.
rreid at sunset.net  http://personalweb.sunset.net/~rreid
Opinions herein are either mine or they are flame bait.
CIRCLE CIRCUMFERENCE = 2 * _pi * r