w(1-BSD) MISC. REFERENCE MANUAL PAGES w(1-BSD)
NAME
w - who is logged in, and what are they doing
SYNOPSIS
/usr/ucb/w [ -hls ] [ user ]
DESCRIPTION
The w command displays a summary of the current activity on
the system, including what each user is doing. The heading
line shows the current time of day, how long the system has
been up, and the number of users logged into the system.
The fields displayed are: the users login name, the name of
the tty the user is on, the time of day the user logged on
(in hours:minutes), the idle time-that is, the number of
minutes since the user last typed anything (in
hours:minutes), the CPU time used by all processes and their
children on that terminal (in minutes:seconds), the CPU time
used by the currently active processes (in minutes:seconds),
the name and arguments of the current process. If a user
name is included, output is restricted to that user. The
following options are available:
-h Suppress the heading.
-l Produce a long form of output, which is the default.
-s Produce a short form of output. In the short form, the
tty is abbreviated, the login time and CPU times are
left off, as are the arguments to commands.
EXAMPLE
w
7:36am up 6 days, 16:45, 1 users
User tty login@ idle JCPU PCPU what
ralph console 7:10am 1 10:05 4:31 w
FILES
/var/adm/utmp
/dev/kmem
/dev/drum
SEE ALSO
ps(1), who(1) in the User's Reference Manual.
utmp(4), whodo(1M) in the System Administrator's Reference
Manual.
NOTES
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
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w(1-BSD) MISC. REFERENCE MANUAL PAGES w(1-BSD)
editor, or when faulty programs running in the background
fork and fail to ignore interrupts. In cases where no pro-
cess can be found, w prints -. The CPU time is only an
estimate, in particular, if someone leaves a background pro-
cess running after logging out, the person currently on that
terminal is ``charged'' with the time. 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. w does not know about the conventions for
detecting background jobs. It will sometimes find a back-
ground job instead of the right one.
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