UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

List using 'who -u' command shows logged out user name along with active users. 'kill -9' command fails to kill the user as there no prcess is running.

Any solution regarding this problem.

who -u command will show the currently logged in users and not logged out user name

this is a bit confusing,

from the man pages of who,
the PID displayed is the pid of the user's current shell

when I tried the same on solaris,
only the PID of the login program which spawned the users-shell is displayed.

Could somebody please throw light upon this ?

Note: In answering the current thread I found this difference that is why I am continuing with the current thread and not starting a new one.

See what your Solaris man pages have for wtmp (or utmp). It usually talks about a struct utmp, usually declared in <utmp.h>

who uses /etc/utmp.

I attached a GNU version of who, if it helps at all.

who uses /etc/utmp in GNU version

and in SOLARIS

who uses the file /var/adm/utmpx for currently logged in users information and for the historic information makes use of /var/adm/wtmpx

following is the code that reads through the utmpx entry but still PID of the login program is only displayed and not that of the user's shell

Code:

# include<utmpx.h>

int main()
{
   struct utmpx *obj;
   setutxent();
   while( (obj=(struct utmpx *)getutxent()) != NULL )
   {
      (void) printf("USER: %s PID:%d\n", obj->ut_user, obj->ut_pid);
   }
   return 0;
}

its from the man pages of who - displays the pid of the current user's shell

as far as the man pages of who,
it is supposed to give the listing of PID of the current shell of the users

when I just tried it is listing only the PID of the login program
the same has been tried reading the /var/adm/utmpx file but still the same output.

I am not sure or right to collect it as a bug ...contradiction between the man pages and the actual output. Due to resource availability I had tried only in solaris and not on any other distributions?
Could somebody please try and append the output obtained.