utx
—
manage the user accounting database
The utx
utility can be used to perform operations on the
user accounting database, as done by
pututxline(3).
The first argument to utx
indicates an
action to be performed:
boot
- Write a boot time record to the user accounting database. This option
should typically only be used by
rc(8).
shutdown
- Write a shutdown time record to the user accounting database. This option
should typically only be used by
rc(8).
rm
- Remove stale sessions from the user accounting database, by referring to
their identifier. Stale sessions can occur if a
login service exits prematurely or fails to remove the session from the
accounting database.
Utilities such as
w(1)
will not display the identifier corresponding with a login session,
since its value is typically only of use by the process managing the
record. The following command can be used to obtain all records from the
user accounting database's active session table, including its
identifiers:
getent utmpx active
Identifiers can either be supplied in hexadecimal form as
displayed by
getent(1),
or as a string if the identifier allows such a representation.
Because this utility requires write-access to the user accounting
database, its use is limited to the super-user.
The utx
utility replaced utxrm
in FreeBSD 10.0.