W(1) | General Commands Manual | W(1) |
w
— display who is
logged in and what they are doing
w |
[--libxo ] [-hin ]
[user ...] |
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 minutes.
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:
--libxo
-h
-i
-n
w
interprets addresses and attempts to display
them as names). When -n
is specified more than
once, hostnames stored in utmp are attempted to resolve to display them as
network addresses.If one or more user names are specified, the output is restricted to those users.
The -M
, -N
,
-d
, -f
,
-l
, -s
, and
-w
flags are no longer supported.
finger(1), ps(1), uptime(1), who(1), libxo(3), xo_parse_args(3)
The w
command appeared in
3.0BSD.
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.
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.
Long hostnames and IPv6 addresses may be truncated.
August 24, 2020 | macOS 14.6 |