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)