[Pkg-shadow-devel] /var/log/lastlog

[Jon Grant]

Hello

Mike Frysinger wrote on 13/04/09 12:51:
> On Monday 13 April 2009 07:10:56 Jon Grant wrote:
>> just noticed that /var/log/lastlog is a binary file. I wondered if it
>> could be made a text file so it was freely readable by normal text tools?
> 
> and break backwards compatibility for no real reason ?  that doesnt sound like 
> a good idea.

You make a good point. Do other UNIX have the same binary format for 
lastlog though? if so it's only backwards compatible within the same 
development of lastlog.

> parsing a text db format is just as easy as parsing the output of lastlog.

yes, it's possible to parse the dump, but this isn't really the unix 
convention. messages, syslog, mtab, Xorg.0.log are all text format, so 
I'm not sure how lastlog ended up as binary.

Regards, Jon