who options?

[Jeff Smith]

this has been bugging me for some time and finally thought about posting
to the group for once instead of wondering every time it happens...

the question is, why, in certain implementations of unix does the 'who'
command not support any options?  It seems to be only on non-unix's
like xenix and bsd type systems, but i can't figure out why either 
every one leaves these out or just plain ignores them.  Good quality
options like -b, or -u or even -d.  It would lead one to believe that
for some reason it just wasn't included, but the same error msg gets
returned every time so it's almost like a problem no one can avoid.
It goes like this:

$ who
who: cannot open utmp.

But utmp is always open, and always in /etc.  does 'who' just not
find it, or can it not read it.  I know it get updated when someone
logs in or out.  Why then can the same system that wrote it not
read it?  All the way from my Altos 486 (yes the old one that looks
like a 586 only shorter) to the NeXT that was just brought in the
other day...hmmmmm...does anyone know why?        

jeffs

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