How to do you get rid off the duplicate name?

[jin Otanashi]

I'm trying to figure out how to eliminated the duplicate of name using the linux last command.

[Ron McLeod]

This may not be the best solution, but maybe use it a starting point for something better:

     last | awk '/^wtmp/ || /^$/ {next;} !seen[$1]++ {print $1}'

It will return a list of unique usernames (field 1) while maintaining order.  It also removes the blank line and the line beginning with wtmp which is included in the command output.  Remove {print $1} if you want to see the whole line.

[jin Otanashi]

Ron McLeod wrote:This may not be the best solution, but maybe use it a starting point for something better:

     last | awk '/^wtmp/ || /^$/ {next;} !seen[$1]++ {print $1}'

It will return a list of unique usernames (field 1) while maintaining order.  It also removes the blank line and the line beginning with wtmp which is included in the command output.  Remove {print $1} if you want to see the whole line.

awk isn't the only way of doing this ?
I know that awk is one way but somehow this will go out of bound or may miss some date using the shell scripts or any programming languages.

[jin Otanashi]

Go out of bound or may miss some data using the shell scripts or using  any programming languages.
Perhaps a linked list or a data structures may work with this but I don't know for sure how this thing will work without the awk.