W(1)                        386BSD Reference Manual                       W(1)

NAME
     w - who present users are and what they are doing

SYNOPSIS
     w [-hi] [user]

DESCRIPTION
     W prints a summary of the current activity on the system, including what
     each user is doing.  The heading shows the current time of day, how long
     the system has been up, 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
     (tty) 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, the CPU
     time used by all processes and their children on that tty, the CPU time
     used by the currently active processes, and the name and arguments of the
     current process.

     Available options are:

     -h      Suppress the heading.

     -i      Output is sorted by idle time.

     If a user name is given, the output is restricted to that user.

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

SEE ALSO
     who(1),  finger(1),  ps(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
     background 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
     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 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 UNIX3.0.

4th Berkeley Distribution       April 23, 1991                               1