"login -h tip.address"??

[der Mouse]

In article <1991May31.042914.11630 at leland.Stanford.EDU>, shedevil at leland.Stanford.EDU (Pontifica Maxima) writes:

> Sorry if this seems to be a 'rtfm' question, but I DID rtfm, and it
> has nothing listed as a "-h" option.

> When someone's job shows as "login -h tip.address" where tip.address
> is the address of a local dial-in, what exactly does that mean?

The -h flag is an undocumented flag to login that is used to pass host
info through to the utmp record.

> If you just type "login", you end up being prompted and logging back
> into the same system.

> If you type "login -h" it goes directly to the password prompt, but
> does not accept your regular password.

> If you type "login -h tip.address" it says "too many arguments".

The reason for these are that login is a built-in command in most
(all?) shells.  The built-in command takes at most one argument, a
username; thus, "login -h tip.address" is too many arguments and "login
-h" tries to log you in as the (probably nonexistent) user named -h.
You need to run the login *program*.  Try using /bin/login instead of
just login.  (Note, if you do this then when you log out you will
likely find yourself back in your original shell; to avoid this use
"exec /bin/login" or some such.)

					der Mouse

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