Re: problems with $WATCH / $WATCHFMT

[Peter Stephenson <pws@hydra.ifh.de>]

mc@prismtech.co.uk wrote:
> in those xterms that i dont work in very often - nothing happens until i 
> press return every so often (ie every couple of hours); in these xterms - 
> when i get the very similar login/out information as the other xterms - 
> its great - except for the fact that the login/out times are effectively 
> (plus/minus a minute) the time of day when i pressed return in that 
> xterm/shell on that machine.

A problem is that after someone's logged out, they're not in utmp any
more, so the real logout time is impossible to get.  The login time
should be OK, however ---- assuming the user is still logged on ---
otherwise it's a bug.

> is there any way of getting these login/out pieces of information to 
> auto-interrupt my shell - without me having to press return before it 
> displays the information? - say by setting an environemnt variable.

That's hard:  you'd actually have to get the shell itself to wake up
and check every now and then.  You might be best doing it some other
way, like a script running in the background.

> after reading the FAQ and doing as it says about copying ypclnt.h and 
> altering the yp_all() signature's third parameter; i still get errors 
> concerning the zle_tricky.c call to yp_all();
> 
> i eventually altered the call from within zle_tricky.c ....
> from:
>     yp_all(domain, PASSWD_MAP, &cb);
> to:
>     yp_all(domain, PASSWD_MAP, cb);

That won't do:  it definitely has to be &cb.  The problems will start
when you try completing user names.  It sounds like your problem is
with including the right version of ypclnt.h.  Maybe I didn't put all
the instructions in the FAQ.  At worst, change the #include for
ypclnt.h to 
#include "my_ypclnt.h"
where my_ypclnt.h is the local modified copy of the header with the
corrected prototype.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@ifh.de>       Tel: +49 33762 77366
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/       Fax: +49 33762 77330
Deutches Electronen-Synchrotron --- Institut fuer Hochenergiephysik Zeuthen
DESY-IfH, 15735 Zeuthen, Germany.