NAME
w
—
display users who are logged on and
what they are doing
SYNOPSIS
w |
[-ahi ] [-M
core] [-N
system] [user] |
DESCRIPTION
The w
utility prints a summary of the
current activity on the system, including what each user is doing. The first
line displays the current time of day, how long the system has been running,
the number of users logged into the system, and the load averages. The load
average numbers give the number of jobs in the run queue averaged over 1, 5
and 15 minutes.
The fields output are the user's login name, the name of the terminal the user is on, the host from which the user is logged in, the time the user logged on, the time since the user last typed anything, and the name and arguments of the current process.
The options are as follows:
-a
- Attempt to translate network addresses into names.
-h
- Suppress the heading.
-i
- Output is sorted by idle time.
-M
core- Extract values associated with the name list from the specified core instead of the running kernel.
-N
system- Extract the name list from the specified system instead of the running kernel.
If a user name is specified, the output is restricted to that user.
FILES
- /var/run/utmp
- list of users on the system
SEE ALSO
STANDARDS
The -f
, -l
,
-s
, -u
, and
-w
flags are no longer supported.
HISTORY
The w
command appeared in
2BSD.
BUGS
The notion of the “current process” is muddy.
Currently, the highest numbered process on the terminal that is not ignoring
interrupts is used, or, if there is none, the highest numbered process on
the terminal. This fails, for example, in critical sections of programs like
the shell and editor, or when faulty programs running in the background fork
and fail to ignore interrupts. (In cases where no process can be found,
w
prints “-”.)
Background processes are not shown, even though they account for much of the load on the system.
Sometimes processes, typically those in the background, are printed with null or garbaged arguments. In these cases, the name of the command is printed in parentheses.
The w
utility does not know about the new
conventions for detection of background jobs. It will sometimes find a
background job instead of the right one.