NAME
w —
who present users are and what they
are doing
SYNOPSIS
w |
[-hinw]
[-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:
-
-
- -h
- Suppress the heading.
-
-
- -i
- Output is sorted by idle time.
-
-
- -M
- Extract values associated with the name list from the
specified core instead of the default “/dev/kmem”.
-
-
- -N
- Extract the name list from the specified system instead of
the default “/netbsd”.
-
-
- -n
- Show network addresses as numbers (normally
w interprets addresses and attempts to display them
symbolically).
-
-
- -w
- Show wide output without truncating any fields.
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
finger(1),
ps(1),
uptime(1),
who(1)
HISTORY
The
w command appeared in
3.0BSD.
BUGS
The notion of the “current process” is muddy. The current algorithm
is ``the highest numbered process on the terminal that is not ignoring
interrupts, 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.