/var/adm/wtmp holds accounting information. You will get a detailed explanation by reading the manpage for it (yes, there is one): "man wtmp".
You can of course delete it, but chances are you do your filesystem no good, because /var/adm/wtmp is constantly being written to. Also you will change the inode of the file which some system routines won't like very much.
If you want to trim it with the system running use:
To remedy your problem: boot in maintenance mode, remove the file, reboot. The file will be created correctly. From then on you can use the above mentioned procedure to trim it.
sorry for being a noob, i am trying to find which user accessed the server at what time and there ip address at first i used who command but the output didn't contain the ip address then i used the last command which provided me with the ip of the users but when i searched i searched and found that... (1 Reply)
In our operating procedures, if a workstation has a space problem in the /var filesystem, one of the most frequent case we were told is the size of the /var/adm/wtmp file.
Someone once told me it is dangerous to do this. Is it ?
I cannot say for certain that whomever wrote that procedure is... (2 Replies)
Hello, we recently upgraded from AIX 5.2.9 to 5.3.6 and in the process the wtmp file was cleared out. Before the upgrade the system had not been rebooted in a very long time, so i'm curious if the clearing of the file is related to the upgrade or the reboot? If it was related to the reboot is... (2 Replies)
I have AIX5.1
I have been trying to learn how to truncate the /var/adm/wtmp file.
I have seen several things on google actually but don't quite understand. I also searched your forums but couldn't find it.
one says this ">/var/adm/wtmp
Is that all I do?
I have a seperate question also. I was... (1 Reply)
Anyone have any idea on how to display the fields for each record stored in the wtmp file using C? Am I correct in thinking that the info stored in wtmp is in binary and that utmpx will be of some help? Being a beginner, I can come up with bits and pieces of what I might need in order to do the... (1 Reply)
When I type last oracle I get dates from Nov 28, 2000 all the way back to the beginning of time it seems. The 11-28-2000 entry states that Oracle is still logged in, but if you type a who, it shows only 1 entry - the currently logged in user (Me as oracle), but I logged in only minutes ago - and... (4 Replies)
Here's a usefull perl script to trim the wtmp file,
in case it got too big, which happens sometimes, or got curropted (which also happens often).
You could learn from here how to parse the wtmp file...
but of course for just reading its content always simply use "last" like Neo said....
... (0 Replies)
I would loke to read the WTMP file. This is a binary file in the /var/logs directory. Is there any utility which will convert this binary file to ASCII format? (1 Reply)