logname/w/who/pinky does not work, no utmp record?

This is *probably* an issue with the old libvte being used. If that is the case it cannot be fixed in the GTK2 version of Terminator. There is a GTK3 version of Terminator, which is based on a much newer version of libvte. Have you tested on that? I don't have my other system up right now to check, but suspect that your commands will work there.

(I tested with my installed guake (also using old libvte) and it has the same issue. This is why I think the issue is in libvte, not Terminator itself.)

utmp logging is not done and AFAICT never was done by vte. It's up to the app.

Gnome-terminal recently removed it which is a controversial change causing some issues (which I don't care about and am happy to see it gone :)), see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747046.

Sorry sorry sorry, shame on me, it _was_ part of vte and not g-t.

So, yup, it's gone, deal with it :P

Correspondingly, Profiles -> Command -> Update login records... seems to be a dead option; its underlying variable update_records is (if I'm not mistaken) only set but never read.

@Egmont: I think the original issue was more about the commands failing. Presumably I can code something in Terminator to replace the utmp logging, If I can figure it out :-)

@Mattias: I tested Terminator(gtk2) in precise (12.04) and saw the same issue as the OP. But in trusty (14.04) it works. Unfortunately you didn't give any info about your system, but if your system is older, it might be related to that.

It's quite tricky to code it up, since it has to be a setuid or setgid wrapper to be able to write that file, plus you have to be sure that that's the only thing it can do and that it cannot write untrue records. Probably you should go for the libutempter library. I've never used that, I just see that that's what xterm and tmux and a few others use.

Well, that's a C library with probably no python wrapper... to make the story more complicated.

A little off-topic, but guake is Python and uses libutempter using ctypes library. Just dropping here to keep the reference:
https://github.com/Guake/guake/blob/master/src/guake/guake_app.py

(gtk3) Since utmp is no longer supported by vte, remove the corresponding config option for now. (We might bring it back later on, but that requires more work.)

@Egmont: Trying to understand a diff between vte 0.2x and vte 0.3x. The following from gtk2:

            if self.config['login_shell']:
                args.insert(0, "-%s" % shell)
            else:
                args.insert(0, shell)

Works for gtk2 if login_shell is true, but throws an exception in gtk3:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./terminator", line 117, in <module>
    TERMINATOR.layout_done()
  File "/home/sboddy/Development/terminator/bugfix-egmontkoblinger/terminatorlib/terminator.py", line 324, in layout_done
    terminal.spawn_child()
  File "/home/sboddy/Development/terminator/bugfix-egmontkoblinger/terminatorlib/terminal.py", line 1415, in spawn_child
    None)
gi._glib.GError: Failed to execute child process "-/bin/bash" (No such file or directory)

From the old vte docs, there is no indication what exactly this is doing. If it was treated as a special case. I'll see if I can get the 0.28 tarball to see if I can figure out what this was for, and if we still need it. Otherwise, we might be able to remove this setting, and option in gtk3.

BTW, Still awaiting feedback from OP as requested in comment #5 where I asked for more info regarding his system.

Doh! Ignore comment #10, I just noticed LP#1520991.

:D