Why does "last" fail on Alpine with "last couldn't open file '/dev/null/wtmp' "?
Why is the last
command failing on my fresh install of Alpine 3.12?
$ last
couldn't open file '/dev/null/wtmp': Not a directory
wtmp begins Thu Jan 1 00:00
(on a Linode server if that matters)
That's a long known issue. Alpine uses libmusl instead of glibc. It seems that
musl does not use or even support
/dev/null/utmp
or/dev/null/wtmp
(and nothing appears to get written to/var/log/wtmp
); so I guess there might not be a way to fix this.
https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/3282#note_15597
There is an open issue for it on the Alpine Linux page and apparently it is a milestone for the 3.14.0 release of Alpine Linux. Until than there is probably no workaround for this.