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This article was posted to the Usenet group alt.hackers in 1995; any technical information is probably outdated.

Re: Help with a tcsh hack


Article: 8224 of alt.hackers
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: adair@scr.siemens.com (Jonathan Adair)
Subject: Re: Help with a tcsh hack
Message-ID: DBKKH7.H6w@scr.siemens.com
Sender: news@scr.siemens.com (NeTnEwS)
Nntp-Posting-Host: sunra.scr.siemens.com
Organization: Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton NJ
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 1995 20:48:41 GMT
Approved: alt.hackers@aol.com
Lines: 36
Status: RO

In article <DBK5w6.7IL@prl.philips.co.uk>,
Ben Hodson <hodsonb@prl.philips.co.uk> wrote:
  ...
>
>ie. I want to change the userid that come up.  I have tried
>various things setting $user and $uid and stuff but to no avail :-(
>
>Any ideas ?

  A lot of stuff still trusts /etc/utmp for the username.  If it is
  writeable (many are), you might try twiddling the username there.


  I have a short piece of code that does this.  I even set off a
  little panic by messing around and changing someone else's
  utmp entry once.

  There are interesting applications.  Some are even legitimate.
  For a while, I would post short notices there for people fingering
  my machine:

  Login       Name              TTY Idle    When    Where
  adair    Jonathan Adair        co   46 Thu 15:30
  AtLunch  Back by 1:30          p2   46 Thu 12:30

  And before people start asking, no I won't send you a copy of
  my code.  As I was once told, "Only a true wizard knows the
  spell of invisibility."

  Type "man utmp" and hack away.

--
Jonathan E. Adair                 Web Page: http://marathon.csee.usf.edu/adair/
adair@scr.siemens.com (primary address for now)  PGP Key (617E4D49) Fingerprint
adair@bigpine.csee.usf.edu (almost permanent address)   12 54 48 F3 EA B4 E7 9C
ccastje@prism.gatech.edu (many moons ago)               F9 85 CD F5 17 60 B3 76



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