Hi all,

Not only am I new to Linux Redhat, but I'm the default administrator of a multiuser system. I see that the "last" command will call up the history of logins. It would be very helpful to be able to extract from this history a report that lists, for each login, user name, their login time and total time on the system. Additional info extracted from their profiles to help identify them would be helpful but is not critical. Exportation to a spreadsheet would be ideal.

I've found many helpful sources for Administration and user profile setups, but nothing that addresses this specific question.

Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance,
Carl

Well...are you able to program? I'm not sure (but it is highly unlikely that there is a command which can do all that for you). Although I haven't come across a program like that, I know that the "last" command takes its info from /var/log/wtmp, so if you do know how to program that would be the ideal place to get your input from.

How many users are there, and how often would you like the "spreadsheet" to be updated? If it's not too often, and there aren't too many users, then you can always just "cat /var/log/wtmp > logins.txt" or just "last > logins.txt", and then sort that info out.

I've had a good look on Google but have been unable to find any GUI programs which do what you say. Maybe you could make the first one!

J_K9

Thanks for the reply, J_K9.

To answer your questions, there could be up to 25-50 logins over a two week period that I would normally use for billing. I wasn't really expecting a GUI to do this sort of thing, just some lines of code that would sort out the contents of the file.

I'll look into your suggestions and see what I get.

Thanks again.
Carl

Sorry I couldn't be of more help! And there must be at least one program that does something like that for you, however good it may be. Anyway, I'm learning C++, so you've given me an idea for my first project in Linux! Cheers,

J_K9