bogus tty entry

[Joseph C. Lininger]

I know you don't want to reboot, but I would recommend just that. The
slackware 8.0 boot scripts will clear out the utmp file when you do this.
They issue a "cat /dev/null > /var/run/utmp" which effectively
clears the file out. Don't do this yourself as the system won't function
right until you reboot if you do. Logins, runlevel, and some other things
will break.

-- 
Joseph C. Lininger
jbahm at pcdesk.net

On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Ralph W. Reid wrote:

> 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!
>
>