User::utmp
Copyright � 1998 Michael Piotrowski. All Rights Reserved.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.
Description
-----------
This module provides a simple Perl interface to utmp-style databases
on UNIX systems, the most important being /etc/utmp, which provides
information about users currently logged in. For more details see the
POD documentation embedded in the file Utmp.pm.
Prerequisites
-------------
Your system should be compliant with SVID2 or at least provide
setutent(), getutent(), endutent(), utmpname() functions compliant
with SVID2.
Portability note
----------------
Unfortunately, the contents of the Utmp structure are highly
system-dependent, making multi-platform support difficult.
Using Utmpx instead looks like a good idea because it is standardized
by XPG4. However, Utmpx is not yet universally supported.
User::Utmp now uses hint files (see the hints directory and the
ExtUtils::MakeMaker man page) to control the inclusion of
system-dependent code. Note that the Linux hint file enables support
for the ut_host and ut_addr fields; these fields exist on the system I
tested it, which is fairly recent. Older versions of Linux seem to
have much more limited Utmp implementations. I'd appreciate a note if
you know of ways to support those without having to parse the header
files.
Building the module
-------------------
The module can be built using this sequence of commands:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
"make test" just tests if the module is loadable, since I don't have a
good idea for portable tests. I've included the script example.pl
instead, which is a variation of what I use for testing.
Installation
------------
make install
History
-------
User::Utmp was developed as a quick solution for a project at hand.
It's therefore a straightforward translation of the C interface to
Perl, but reduces the number of functions from four to two. It has
the following limitations:
- It's not object-oriented
- It's not reentrant and therefore not thread-safe
- It reads the whole file
User::Utmp is used extensively in an in-house project and seems to
work well. However, since it has not been tested elsewhere, consider
this a beta release.
Feedback
--------
User::Utmp was tested on HP-UX 10.20, Solaris 2.5.1, and Linux 2.0.36.
If you are building the module on another architecture I'd appreciate
a note about how you got on.
Michael Piotrowski <
[email protected]>
