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prasanna
Asked: 2011-12-24 03:36:22 +0800 CST

last loggedin users in linux showing 8 characters only

  • 772

I am using last command in linux to fetch last loggedin user. But last command shows only 8 characters in the username field. In the below image, username administrator is trimmed to administ.

Is there any other way to get the full name of last logged-in user ?

I tried lastlog too.

enter image description here

linux

3 Answers

  1. last -w should do the trick for you. I don't have any long usernames to test this with but the man page suggests it should work.

    You can also use last -a to list hostnames as the last field and not truncate them or last -i to display them as IP addresses instead of hostnames.

    These are local users to your system so you could grep them out of your /etc/passwd file if the above options don't work. You should only run into problems doing that if you have two users that share the same first 8 characters.

    Failing all of that, you could try strings /var/log/wtmp. This data will be somewhat more difficult to interpret but it should contain the full usernames and hostnames.

    • 16

  2. Try this,

    show all available login since last restart:

    last -Fw | grep -E 'Oct ([ 1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-9]|30)' | grep $(date +"%Y")

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  3. last reads from utmp, and there the username field is limited to 8 characters. So it's better to have username somewhat unique within the first characters.

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