utmpdump (1)

Leading comments

Copyright (C) 2010 Michael Krapp

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for mo...

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man1/utmpdump.1".)

NAME

utmpdump - dump UTMP and WTMP files in raw format

SYNOPSIS

utmpdump [options] [filename]

DESCRIPTION

utmpdump is a simple program to dump UTMP and WTMP files in raw format, so they can be examined. utmpdump reads from stdin unless a filename is passed.

OPTIONS

-f, --follow

Output appended data as the file grows.

-o, --output file

Write command output to file instead of standard output.

-r, --reverse

Undump, write back edited login information into the utmp or wtmp files.

-V, --version

Display version information and exit.

-h, --help

Display help text and exit.

NOTES

utmpdump can be useful in cases of corrupted utmp or wtmp entries. It can dump out utmp/wtmp to an ASCII file, which can then be edited to remove bogus entries, and reintegrated using:

utmpdump -r < ascii_file > wtmp

But be warned, utmpdump was written for debugging purposes only.

BUGS

You may not use the -r option, as the format for the utmp/wtmp files strongly depends on the input format. This tool was not written for normal use, but for debugging only.

AUTHOR

Michael Krapp

SEE ALSO

last(1), w(1), who(1), utmp(5)

AVAILABILITY

The utmpdump command is part of the util-linux package and is available from Linux Kernel Archive