w —
display users who are logged on and what they are
doing
w |
[ -ahi
]
[-M
core
]
[-N
system
]
[user ] |
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.
- /var/run/utmp
- list of users on the system
finger(1),
ps(1),
uptime(1),
who(1),
utmp(5)
The
-f,
-l,
-s,
-u, and
-w flags are no longer supported.
The
w command appeared in
2BSD.
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.
![[OpenBSD]](/openbsd.gif){kind=small}