I have a killuser script that fails only on two 10.04 LTS machines 

because the date format in the who command is different. What is odd is 

that from the command prompt it is correct:

guest    tty7         2011-10-13 14:12  old         1291 (:0)

But in the script the time format get changed!

guest    tty7         Oct 13 14:12  old         1291 (:0)

Where and why would the time format change only in a bash script and 

only on two machines.

Background is these are public computers and I have have script that 

reset the profiles every night. The rest script ends any active profile 

sessions before restoring them. It calls the killuser script that finds 

the pids of the active sessions and kill them:

PIDS=$(who -u | egrep "${USERSLIST}" | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 6)

The script takes a list of uids and builds a regex ORed list 

"foo|bar|baz", removes the duplicated spaces and grabs the 6th field 

which should be the pid. So $PIDS should be an array of all active 

'guest' sessions. And it does on all but two systems where the who 

command looks like the former format with the date '2011-10-13 14:12' 

but fails where the date format is 'Oct 13 14:12'. The latter end up 

getting the IDLE field and not the PID field.

1) Why would the format be different in the bash script from the command 

line?

2) Where would the setting be? .profile is the same for system that work 

vs ones that don't

3) If there is a better way to get the pids of selected active user 

sessions, I am open to suggestions.

-- 

Take care,

Jonathan

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