Pseudo-Terminal Forever

[Amos Shapira]

Asa Romberger <asa at unisoft.uucp> writes:
> In article <38 at etl.ARPA> richr at etl.arpa. (Rich Rosenthal) writes:
> >    For a change of pace, on one of the pseudo-terminals
> >    I exec'ed login and latter logged out.
> >
> >    Result.  The account 'news' is still logged in 5 days latter, but,
> >    there are zero (0) processes associated with the login.
>
> I have had the same problem with a different psdeudo-terminal package.
> The problem is probably that the programs that were running on the pseudo-
> terminal managed to exit without cleaning up /etc/utmp. The only way that I
> found to cure the problem was to write a program that looked for that entry
> in /etc/utmp and clear the ut_type field.

      Could make it simpler. Just "enable" and then "disable" the tty,
    even if it is a pty. On 4.2BSD this is to edit /etc/ttys, kill -1
    1, then re-edit /etc/ttys and then again kill -1 1. On a 4.3BSD
    there is a disable/enable program. I wrote one for 4.2BSD, if anyone
    wants it, just drop me a note.

      I never delved into this deeply, but from a brief look in
    rlogind sources on a 4.2, it looks that it is very likely that
    the son of the deamon (or the deamon itself) got killed before
    having a chance to remove you from /etc/utmp.

      BTW, this "enable/disable" trick is very usefull for logging out
    users, in case their tty got stack or you have to do a backup.

--Amos Shapira

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