W(1) User Commands W(1)

NAME

w - display information about currently logged-in users

SYNOPSIS

w [-hlsuw] [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, the length of time the system has been up, the number of users
logged into the system, and the average number of jobs in the run queue
over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.


The fields displayed are: the user's login name, the name of the tty the
user is on, the time of day the user logged on (in ISO time format,
weekday name and hours:minutes, or ISO date format), the idle time--that
is, the number of minutes since the user last typed anything (in
hours:minutes:seconds), the CPU time used by all processes and their
children on that terminal (in hours:minutes:seconds), the CPU time used
by the currently active processes (in hours:minutes:seconds), and the
name and arguments of the current process.

OPTIONS

The following options are supported:

-h
Suppresses the heading.


-l
Produces a long form of output, which is the default.


-s
Produces 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.


-u
Produces the heading line which shows the current time, the length
of time the system has been up, the number of users logged into the
system, and the average number of jobs in the run queue over the
last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.


-w
Produces a long form of output, which is also the same as the
default.

OPERANDS

user
Name of a particular user for whom login information is
displayed. If specified, output is restricted to that user.

EXAMPLES

Example 1: Sample Output From the w Command

example% w


10:54am up 27 day(s), 57 mins, 1 user, load average: 0.28, 0.26, 0.22
User tty login@ idle JCPU PCPU what
ralph console 7:10am 1 10:05 4:31 w

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

See environ(7) for descriptions of the following environment variables
that affect the execution of w: LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and LC_TIME.

FILES

/var/adm/utmpx
user and accounting information

SEE ALSO

ps(1), who(1), utmpx(5), attributes(7), environ(7), whodo(8)

NOTES

The notion of the "current process" is unclear. 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 conventions for detecting background jobs. It
will sometimes find a background job instead of the right one.


December 15, 2013 W(1)