last loggedin users in linux showing 8 characters only

Question

I am using last command in linux to fetch last loggedin user. But last command shows only 8 characters in the username field. In the below image, username administrator is trimmed to administ.

Is there any other way to get the full name of last logged-in user ?

I tried lastlog too.

Answer 1

last -w should do the trick for you. I don't have any long usernames to test this with but the man page suggests it should work.

You can also use last -a to list hostnames as the last field and not truncate them or last -i to display them as IP addresses instead of hostnames.

These are local users to your system so you could grep them out of your /etc/passwd file if the above options don't work. You should only run into problems doing that if you have two users that share the same first 8 characters.

Failing all of that, you could try strings /var/log/wtmp. This data will be somewhat more difficult to interpret but it should contain the full usernames and hostnames.

Answer 2

last reads from utmp, and there the username field is limited to 8 characters. So it's better to have username somewhat unique within the first characters.