Comment 3 for bug 268780

Thank you for reporting this bug and helping make Ubuntu better. I am downgrading this bug temporarily to Incomplete: 'who' (and 'pinky', a reduced version of 'finger') base their output on the utmp(5) file. Neither goes anywhere else.

In other words, 'who' is very much restricted to browsing the 'utmp' file contents. This is a major problem to what you want, since (1) most X programs do not write events to utmp; (2) the, huh, "event" you are looking for is something similar to "user is idling", and this event is not recorded (and, I think, not even defined) on utmp.

An additional point is that, no matter what, 'who' is a core utility: it does not depend on anything else but the basic *IX system it is running under; it does not know, or care, if a running programme is graphical or not, or what it is doing. All it knows about is entries in the utmp file. So, if a program (like most X) does *not* update utmp, then 'who' will not know about it.

Although in a different scenario, this has been explained in the coreutils mailing list at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-07/msg00018.html.

I am searching for similar scenarios meanwhile, since somebody must have had this type of issue before. So far I have found a BOINC ticket, still open, on that: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/ticket/463.

Meanwhile, please feel free to propose your changes upstream, at the coreutils mailing list: simply email <email address hidden>.