utmpdump(1) — Linux manual page
UTMPDUMP(1) User Commands UTMPDUMP(1)
NAME
utmpdump - dump UTMP and WTMP files in raw format
SYNOPSIS
utmpdump [options] filename
DESCRIPTION
utmpdump is a simple program to dump UTMP and WTMP files in raw
format, so they can be examined. utmpdump reads from stdin unless
a filename is passed.
OPTIONS
-f, --follow
Output appended data as the file grows.
-o, --output file
Write command output to file instead of standard output.
-r, --reverse
Undump, write back edited login information into the utmp or
wtmp files.
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
-V, --version
Print version and exit.
NOTES
utmpdump can be useful in cases of corrupted utmp or wtmp
entries. It can dump out utmp/wtmp to an ASCII file, which can
then be edited to remove bogus entries, and reintegrated using:
utmpdump -r < ascii_file > wtmp
But be warned, utmpdump was written for debugging purposes only.
File formats
Only the binary version of the utmp(5) is standardised. Textual
dumps may become incompatible in future.
The version 2.28 was the last one that printed text output using
ctime(3) timestamp format. Newer dumps use millisecond precision
ISO-8601 timestamp format in UTC-0 timezone. Conversion from
former timestamp format can be made to binary, although attempt
to do so can lead the timestamps to drift amount of timezone
offset.
BUGS
You may not use the -r option, as the format for the utmp/wtmp
files strongly depends on the input format. This tool was not
written for normal use, but for debugging only.
AUTHORS
Michael Krapp
SEE ALSO
last(1), w(1), who(1), utmp(5)
REPORTING BUGS
For bug reports, use the issue tracker at
https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues.
AVAILABILITY
The utmpdump command is part of the util-linux package which can
be downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
<https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page
is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
utilities) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have
a bug report for this manual page, send it to
util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2024-06-14. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
that was found in the repository was 2024-06-10.) If you discover
any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
or you have corrections or improvements to the information in
this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page),
send a mail to man-pages@man7.org
util-linux 2.39.594-1e0ad 2023-07-19 UTMPDUMP(1)
Pages that refer to this page: getutmp(3), utmp(5)