W(1)W(1)NAME
w - who is on and what they are doing
SYNOPSIS
w [ -fhlsuW ] [ user ]
DESCRIPTION
w prints 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, 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 tty the
user is on, the host from which the user is logged in (generally the
session's $DISPLAY variable: see xdm(1)), the time the user logged on,
the length of time since the user last typed anything, the CPU time used
by all processes and their children on that terminal, the CPU time used
by the currently active processes, the name and arguments of the current
process.
The options are:
-h suppresses the heading.
-u displays the heading only (same as uptime(1)).
-s displays 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.
-l gives the long output, which is the default.
-f suppresses the ``from'' field.
-W shows a wider field for the program name and displays the ``from''
field on a separate line, untruncated. (The utmpx ut_host field
accommodates a 256-character string, but most commands truncate
before displaying it).
If a user name is included, the output will be restricted to that user.
NOTESw(1) and who(1) can report different idle times for the same line. w
will report the time elapsed since input occurred, while who will report
the time elapsed since output occurred (roughly speaking). If there is a
job running that produces output, the idle times will differ between the
two programs:
babylon: who -Hu
NAME LINE TIME IDLE PID COMMENTS
root ttyd1 Jul 6 10:37 . 1955 alt console
Page 1
W(1)W(1)
babylon: w
User tty from login@ idle JCPU PCPU what
root d1 10:37am 5:54 23 23 tail -f SYSLOG
wanda: w -W
6:06am up 755 days, 13:53, 6 users, load average: 0.11, 0.10, 0.11
User tty login@ idle JCPU PCPU what
jimclark ttyq36 6:06am 1:56 -ksh
192.111.17.42
tj ttyq33 Fri 8am 8:21 6 rlogin peanut.csd
:0.0
ed ttyq38 6:11am 1 w -W
gate-bonnie.wpd.sgi.com:0.0
FILES
/var/adm/utmp
/dev/kmem
SEE ALSOxdm(1), who(1), ps(1), uptime(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 ``-''.)
When calculating load average, certain sleeping processes are counted as
runnable.
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.
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