The subject line showed up in a ps -ax listing about 5 minutes ago.
Since the -- option is not mentioned in man login, I tried to google,
but the minus signs don't google well. What do the '--' and the '1'
arguments mean?

Thanks,
Dave Feustel

dave <daf@a64.comcast.net> writes:

> The subject line showed up in a ps -ax listing about 5 minutes ago.
> Since the -- option is not mentioned in man login, I tried to google,

The "--" option is a somewhat standard part of option processing that
says "I'm finished with options", the rest of the command line are
non-option arguments. See getopt(3), the library function used by
most software to process command line options, for more information.

> but the minus signs don't google well. What do the '--' and the '1'
> arguments mean?

The login(1) man page says that the non-option argument is "user",
so I'd expect it to be a user name. You'll need to find out what
process invoked login to see why that process passed a user named 1.

// marc