DEAD_PROCESSes in /etc/utmp and the who am i command

[Thomas Russo]

Is there any way to clean out lists of DEAD_PROCESSes from /etc/utmp
so that commands like 
who am i 
and 
talk 

work correctly?  Let me be more specific.   who -a shows (for example):

...
rlogin     ttyq14       Jan 17 10:52  0:42  21114  id= q14 term=0   exit=0
...
russo      ttyq14        Jan 17 11:05  0:01  20529


so a who am I by russo on ttyq14 (an xterm window on an X terminal)
shows

rlogin     ttyq14	...

and if I say talk user then user gets a message "...talk from user
rlogin " or some such garbage.


This kind of thing happens all the time around here, and seems to be
tied to unusual exits from xterm, but actually I can't reproduce it on
demand.  All I'd like is an easy way to fix it up, preferably without
writing a program to monkey with /etc/utmp myself.

There is another /etc/utmp anomaly I'd like to figure out:  frequently
if a remote user does an ftp to our machine and then lets the thing
time out we get a ghost user in all subsequent whos.  This persists,
of course, until system reboot time (we take the system down once a
week for backups).  Any neat way to clean them up?


Thomas Russo
Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Texas at Austin          
russo at chaos.utexas.edu or phib421 at utchpc.bitnet
------