
What I learned trying to log wall - wtbob
http://tilde.club/~phooky/logging_wall.html
======
rahimiali
interestingly, soda.csua.bekeley.edu had logging by 1993. and the mechanism? a
complete rewrite of wall as the redundantly named wallall, which wrote to a
log file right after it wrote to all the ttys. that way there was no need to
snarf a pty just to log.

and by the way, i don't agree that it's ok to log any public stream just
because it's public. some public media don't feel like a medium of record, and
invite an informal behavior that their users would regret if they knew they
were being logged. if i knew everything i'd say in public could be held
against me forever, i'd say very different things.

~~~
schoen
Wasn't there something with the username of the log file being named after
Larry Wall? Or the account that you finger to read it? Because his last name
was also Wall?

... although he actually did study at UC Berkeley at one point, so maybe the
plot was somehow thicker than I realized.

------
tomcam
I'll be darned. It's still there in OSX. It's actually nice because if I have
a lot of terminal windows open I can send a reminder to myself in all of them
quickly.

------
geofft
Probably your best option is to use screen, which is generally appropriately
setuid (and installed on non-graphical machines), and tell screen to log all
output to a file.

You may need to use C-a L to ask screen to register the current window in
utmp.

------
mayoff
I think `script ssh localhost` ought to do the trick.

------
solidsnack9000
Perhaps `utmp` is a `tmp` file storing `u`sers.

~~~
gpvos
If true (and I think it's rather probable), that is yet another example that
nothing is as permanent as a temporary hack.

~~~
thwarted
`tmp` doesn't necessarily mean that the file or the hack is temporary, but
perhaps that it _contains_ temporary, ephemeral, or temporal information.

~~~
gpvos
You have a point there, although temporary/ephemeral only holds for utmp. wtmp
(and btmp) are more like logs; so they are temporal, but that's really not the
expected meaning of `tmp` in Unix. utime appeared in V7, while utmp appeared
in V6, so that is no excuse either (unless the name was already used
internally).

