utmp and finger

[Peter Samuelson]

[David Lee <T.D.Lee at durham.ac.uk>]
> I was able to reproduce your problem.  It seems that "finger" wants
> to use the "line" as a real connection, and gets upset when it cannot
> stat "/dev/smb/1" which doesn't exist (contrast against, say, a
> terminal login on "/dev/pts/1").

Why on earth should finger need to stat the tty anyway?  It won't
necessarily be able to *open* it, since it's running as an arbitrary
user, so why bother with stat()?  Perhaps it is trying to be helpful
and report symlink targets, but again, why?  Anyway, I'd call this a
bug in finger.

Peter