lastlog devours universe

[Matthew Miller]

On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 09:30:21AM -0700, Andy Ross wrote:
> clearly undesirable and dumb.  Imaging the flames if windows was
> discovered to have a magic file that would fill up the filesystem if
> you tried to copy it to a different folder.  Why is this different?

It's not different; it's identical. <http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs-sparse.htm>

> (lastlog(8), which can only be run by root).  If this thing went away
> tomorrow, I doubt anyone would notice.  Meaningful user login auditing
> is done with other tools.  Are there any other clients for this file,
> anywhere?

The 'finger' command uses it too. In this day and age, that's generally seen
as a bad thing, though. :) And if the file isn't accessible (ie on fedora,
you're not running as root) it silently falls back to saying "never logged
in". 


> One could duplicate lastlog(8) using last(1) with a few lines of perl.
> Can we please stop the fanboy flamewars?  This file is a silly side
> effect of the change to 32 bit UIDs, and needs to be fixed.

Suggestion: write this drop-in replacement (although ideally not in perl --
python is kinda the fedora-tools-language-of-choice) for the lastlog command
that does the same thing but uses the information from wtmp. Then, let's get
that into extras, and eventually have it replace the shadow-utils command. 

Code speaks louder than flamewars. :)

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 80 degrees Fahrenheit.