Why Last-login?

[Yassine Chaouche]

Le 3/3/21 à 12:57 PM, @lbutlr a écrit :
> I've noticed several threads over the last year or so about last-login, and I was curious WHY people care about tracking this in the database. I can see wanting to know if a user has logged in recently, but this seems quite easy to tell by simply looking at the time stamp and/or contents of the mail spool for the user.
>
> For example, on my system I can look at the timestamps on the 'new' folders in the user's maildir to see if they are getting mail, and if the folders are empty, I have a time stamp of when they last checked that mailbox, giving me a pretty accurate time for when they last logged in.
>
> For example, looking at one user:
>
>   # ls -lsdtr /path/to/user/maildir/{new,.**/new}
>
> I can see that the most recent "new" mailboxes were accessed on 02 Mar 14:25 and 03 Mar 01:45, and I can see that the latter mailbox has files in it and the former mailbox does not (just by the size, without doing an extra ls of those directories), so I know that the last time the user logged in was about 14:25 or later yesterday and that they definitely have not logged in in the last 3h05, which seems close enough to me.
>
> Am I missing some reason I would need/want to keep track of that specific login time separately?
>
What about mbox files ?

-- Yassine.