hey,

Ok, I'm sorry if this sounds like a lazy question but I need some pointers....

How would I create a file at startup, based on the name of the user logging in and the login time. A quick goole tells me that the commands 'who' and 'lastlog' will tell me this info at the cli, and I know that these commands use data from files in the /dev directorey to get this information. But where would I look in the /dev directory to find this out.

Also, I ultimately want to put the code to create this file in a shell script that will run at startup. Where would I put this script so that it will be run each time a user logs in?

Thanks,
Gearóid

How about:
echo User `whoami` logged in at `date` > /path/to/file

If you just want to know when people logged in then use the "last" command.

beautiful, as simple as that!! Thanks david

so I'll just enclose that in a little shell script, but my next question is where would I place this script, or how would I configure it to run each time a user logs in?

/etc/bashrc is run each time a shell is opened.