Manual Pages  — UTX

The first argument to utx indicates an action to be performed:

boot	Write a boot time record to the user accounting database. This option should typically only be used by rc(8).
shutdown
	Write a shutdown time record to the user accounting database. This option should typically only be used by rc(8).
rm	Remove stale sessions from the user accounting database, by referring to their identifier. Stale sessions can occur if a login service exits prematurely or fails to remove the session from the accounting database. Utilities such as w(1) will not display the identifier corresponding with a login session, since its value is typically only of use by the process managing the record. The following command can be used to obtain all records from the user accounting database's active session table, including its identifiers:     getent utmpx active Identifiers can either be supplied in hexadecimal form as displayed by getent(1), or as a string if the identifier allows such a representation.

Because this utility requires write-access to the user accounting database, its use is limited to the super-user.