On Nov 21,  2:55am, jnemeth@victoria.tc.ca (John Nemeth) wrote:
-- Subject: Re: sample utmpx implementation

|      Do we really care about people doing the wrong thing.  It is next
| to impossible to protect the system from incompetent admins.  I don't
| think we should greatly complicate the system just on the off chance
| that an admin might do something silly.  Especially since making
| lastlogx a db would greatly increase its size for the people that do
| the right thing and leave it alone.  I.e. this would actually penalise
| people that do the right thing, which would be bad.

Considering how sparse files work, a db file might be smaller (I
think the way it works is that you need to allocate BLKSIZE on each
block you write). These days it is not uncommon to have uids in
the 20 thousand range. Sparse files are still not commonly used in
unix, and it could be mystifying to the uniniated to have a 40G
file in a 1G disk. I agree that you cannot prevent a stupid person
from doing stupid things. OTOH, db is part of libc, and the penalty
for using it is minimal...

christos