Wrap shell invocation with utmp add/remove, for de-utmpified gnome-terminal etc.
Modern terminal emulators no longer write to utmp (see
here, for example).
Consequently things like wall, who, rwho, talk, rcvtty etc. no
longer work. This tiny wrapper can be used to restore that
functionality.
Example usage would be to edit your profile for gnome-terminal to run
a custom command based on this template instead of your default login
shell:
/full/path/to/utmp_wrap /your/shell --login… so a tcsh user might set this to …/utmp_wrap /bin/tcsh -l.
This code is enabled by, and dependent on, libutempter; unfortunately version 1.1.6-3 of this on Debian is broken. The patch attached to that report enables successful use of utmp_wrap.