FreeBSD Man Pages

w(1)

NAME

     w -- display who is logged in and what they are doing

SYNOPSIS

     w [-dhin] [-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 min-
     utes.

     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:

     -d      dumps out the entire process list on a per controlling tty basis,
	     instead of just the top level process.

     -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 ``/boot/kernel/kernel''.

     -n      Don't attempt to resolve network addresses (normally w interprets
	     addresses and attempts to display them as names).

     If one or more user names are specified, the output is restricted to
     those users.

FILES

     /var/run/utmp  list of users on the system

SEE ALSO

     finger(1), ps(1), uptime(1), who(1)

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 back-
     ground fork and fail to ignore interrupts.  (In cases where no process
     can be found, w prints ``-''.)

     The CPU time is only an estimate, in particular, if someone leaves a
     background process running after logging out, the person currently on

     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.

COMPATIBILITY

     The -f, -l, -s, and -w flags are no longer supported.

HISTORY

     The w command appeared in 3.0BSD.

FreeBSD 5.4			 June 6, 1993			   FreeBSD 5.4

SPONSORED LINKS