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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!news.u.washington.edu!cave!rearl From: rearl@cave.tcp.com (Robert Earl) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Strange idle times with finger... Date: 20 May 93 22:50:44 GMT Organization: The Commnet Project Lines: 22 Message-ID: <rearl.737938244@cave> References: <C7B7Jn.sH@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: eith.biostr.washington.edu mike@hopper.Virginia.EDU (Michael Chapman) writes: | I'm running NEWS-OS 4.1c (4.3BSD) and when I finger on my machine, idle | times are outrageously false - | mike Mike Chapman p0 19d Wed 18:13 | mike Mike Chapman p2 2:20 Wed 18:14 | mike Mike Chapman p3 Wed 18:13 | mike Mike Chapman *:0 18d Wed 18:13 The finger program only reads the utmp file and stat()s the appropriate tty devices; it typically doesn't bother to check if there are active processes behind an entry. The times you see are the last mtimes of the tty files in /dev; either there was a shell attached to them that failed to erase its entry in /etc/utmp, or you have just started a shell and haven't typed anything to that window yet. Or, the device in question doesn't update its mtime when keyboard activity is recorded (probably the case for the ":0" pseudo-device entry). -- robert earl | rearl@ucsd.edu | Dyslexics of the world, untie! rearl@oinker.ucsb.edu |