Re: coreutils: 'who' behaves strangely

[Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr>]

> Just calling 'who' does not display
> anything at all.

Your file /var/run/utmp may be locked.
Try this :
    ps -f -p `fuser /var/run/utmp`
It will show all the processes currently using the utmp file.

A few days ago, I had the same problem.
The command above showed me a lot of old and frozen gnome-pty-helper.
I killed all of those processes whose PPID was 1, and the who command worked again (with bad data, because the file /var/run/utmp was not up to date).

It worked for me... until next occurence of the problem.
Good luck.

Vincent.