Bug 91442

Summary: 'who am i' and 'who -m' do not return results as expected
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: J. Erik Hemdal <erik.hemdal>
Component: gnome-terminalAssignee: Havoc Pennington <hp>
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE QA Contact: David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 8.0CC: tbaecker.spam
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i686   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2003-10-04 06:05:27 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Flags
Test script for 91442 none

Description J. Erik Hemdal 2003-05-22 17:15:51 UTC 
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021003

Description of problem:
Problems with 'who' command.

who -m
who am i
who mom likes

do not return any results on my RHAT 8 system.  man and info pages say these
should return the session username.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
sh-utils-2.0.12-3

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
#! /bin/bash

# Test the output of who, who -m, who am i, whoami, and who mom likes
# All of these are documented to work; not all do in RHAT 8.0.

echo "This is unadorned 'who'"

	who

echo "This is 'who -m':"

	who -m

echo "This is 'who mom likes':"

	who mom likes

echo "This is 'who am i':"

	who am i

echo "This is 'whoami':"

	whoami




Actual Results:  This is unadorned 'who'
erik     :0           May 22 11:55         
This is 'who -m':
This is 'who mom likes':
This is 'who am i':
This is 'whoami':
erik


Expected Results:  Should have seen the username 'erik' in all cases.

Additional info:

No error messages.  These options work as expected in previous versions of Red
Hat Linux that I have used (5.2, 7.1, 7.3).  Represents a regression of 
function (old scripts using who -m or who am i) would break.
Comment 1 J. Erik Hemdal 2003-05-22 17:18:00 UTC 
Created attachment 91900 [details]
Test script for 91442

Test script attached.
Comment 2 Tim Waugh 2003-05-23 11:55:02 UTC 
This is due to gnome-terminal not adding utmp entries.  For example, try running
who from inside an 'xterm -ls' window.
Comment 3 J. Erik Hemdal 2003-05-23 22:30:22 UTC 
I confirmed that who works as expected in an xterm.  Also works in gnome-
terminal-2.2.1-3 (delivered in Red Hat 9).
Comment 4 ThomasBaeckeroot 2017-08-21 20:55:23 UTC 
Possible replacement from `who am i | awk '{print $1}'` (what most are looking for):
ls -l `tty` | awk '{print $3}'


Explanation below…

On many systems "`who am i`" is equivalent to "`who -m`". 
The Problem here is that with some terminals, "who -m" returns nothing.

Example #1 run from a xfce4-terminal

    Pegasus ~ # whoami
    root
    Pegasus ~ # who am i
    thomas   pts/1        2017-08-19 11:15 (:0.0)
    Pegasus ~ # who -m
    thomas   pts/1        2017-08-19 11:15 (:0.0)
    Pegasus ~ # who
    thomas   tty8         2017-08-19 10:18 (:0)
    thomas   pts/1        2017-08-19 11:15 (:0.0)
    thomas   pts/5        2017-08-19 16:16 (:0.0)
    Pegasus ~ # who am i | awk '{print $1}'
    thomasPossible replacement from `who am i | awk '{print $1}'` (what most are looking for):
ls -l `tty` | awk '{print $3}'


Explanation below…

On many systems "`who am i`" is equivalent to "`who -m`". 
The Problem here is that with some terminals, "who -m" returns nothing.

Example #1 run from a xfce4-terminal

    Pegasus ~ # whoami
    root
    Pegasus ~ # who am i
    thomas   pts/1        2017-08-19 11:15 (:0.0)
    Pegasus ~ # who -m
    thomas   pts/1        2017-08-19 11:15 (:0.0)
    Pegasus ~ # who
    thomas   tty8         2017-08-19 10:18 (:0)
    thomas   pts/1        2017-08-19 11:15 (:0.0)
    thomas   pts/5        2017-08-19 16:16 (:0.0)
    Pegasus ~ # who am i | awk '{print $1}'
    thomas
    Pegasus ~ # 


but
Example #2 from a gnome-terminal (same computer, same commands)

    Pegasus ~ # whoami
    root
    Pegasus ~ # who am i
    Pegasus ~ # who -m
    Pegasus ~ # who
    thomas   tty8         2017-08-19 10:18 (:0)
    thomas   pts/1        2017-08-19 11:15 (:0.0)
    thomas   pts/5        2017-08-19 16:16 (:0.0)
    Pegasus ~ # 

This seems to be a consequence of gnome-terminal not adding utmp entries…

    Pegasus ~ # 


but
Example #2 from a gnome-terminal (same computer, same commands)

    Pegasus ~ # whoami
    root
    Pegasus ~ # who am i
    Pegasus ~ # who -m
    Pegasus ~ # who
    thomas   tty8         2017-08-19 10:18 (:0)
    thomas   pts/1        2017-08-19 11:15 (:0.0)
    thomas   pts/5        2017-08-19 16:16 (:0.0)
    Pegasus ~ # 

This seems to be a consequence of gnome-terminal not adding utmp entries…