Shell Programming and Scripting

Well what's happening there is a daggling utmp entry. How that happened depends on exactly how you logged in. In a typical scenario, telnetd is forked when someone connects via telnet. telnetd forks a login program which makes the utmp entry that you saw. The login program execs a shell. Eventually the shell exits. telnetd is the parent of that shell and notices the death of its child. So it cleans up that utmp entry and exits.

Now, consider what would happen if that telnetd instance was killed with a -9 signal. It dies immediately. It can't clean anything up.

I see you are still going straight for the -9 in your script. You might want to try the advice I gave in that first thread.

With all of this said, the telnetd instance does not normally acquire the terminal as a controlling terminal and so I would not expect this particular script to kill telnetd. And you may not be using telnet anyway. Still, somehow, the parent process of the shell is dying permaturely. And I would tend to suspect your -9 habit as the cause.

Also the contents of the utmp file is not really important. People can connect and not have a utmp entry. And, as you see, utmp can have garbage laying around. ps is the command to use to know what's happening on your system.

thanks for that explanation
The users login using telnet
and i did follow your advise on using -15 instead of -9.
The problem is that when users login, the profile send's them directly to the aplication they use on the machine , and using -15 on that first script that you pointed to me, will kill the aplication processes but living them in the operating system, wich i don't want to happen. I believe this has to do with the profile, but i'll have to check that out. On this script i'm now using -15 and i will see how it goes.
thanks a lot Perderabo

with this script , -15 is working fine and no longer (at least till now) left me with that kind of processes.
So, you'r right
thanks once again