UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

In a professional environment with traditional application you often want (or are asked) to report the users.
Traditionally there is the who command

Code:

who | awk '{print $1}'

telnetd or sshd register the users in the utmp file, to be shown with who, w, users, finger, pinky, ...
In addition they register the users in the wtmp file, to be shown with the last command.
Also traditional shell windows like xterm do it.

But recent gnome-terminal and mate-terminal have dropped support for utmp/wtmp.
There seems to be an agreement among desktop developers.
Another example:
When starting a desktop, the first shell on the system no longer registers to utmp/wtmp.
(Further, it does not even run as a login shell. I.e. it does not read .profile. Linux distros do crazy work-arounds like sourcing .profile from the system's bashrc.)

Multi-desktop/application providers like Citrix (with products XenApp/XenDesktop for Linux) no longer do a registration.

Now to the solutions. I found the best way is to run a ps command.
As stated by How to see how many users in Linux:

Code:

ps -eaho user | sort -u

Of course this is incorrect in Linux: the h option is BSD-only and forces the ps into BSD mode. And by convention you should not use a dash then.
Correction:

Code:

ps aho user | sort -u

Removing the duplicates with awk is faster than sort -u

Code:

ps aho user | awk 'u[$1]++==0'

How to do this on Posix-compatible systems?
There is no "show for all users with tty" option.
But one can display the ttys and let awk select the valid ones

Code:

ps -e -o tty= -o user= | awk '$1~/[^?]/ && u[$2]++==0 {print $2}'

Note: the user= must be last, otherwise the chance is high that long usernames are truncated (e.g. Linux does it).

Thanks for the info!