w(1) - NetBSD Manual Pages

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W(1)                    NetBSD General Commands Manual                    W(1)


NAME

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


SYNOPSIS

     w [-hinw] [-M core] [-N system] [user]


DESCRIPTION

     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 min-
     utes.

     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:

     -h      Suppress the heading.

     -i      Output is sorted by idle time.

     -M      Extract values associated with the name list from the specified
             core instead of the default ``/dev/kmem''.

     -N      Extract the name list from the specified system instead of the
             default ``/netbsd''.

     -n      Show network addresses as numbers (normally w interprets
             addresses and attempts to display them symbolically).

     -w      Show wide output without truncating any fields.

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


FILES

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


SEE ALSO

     finger(1), ps(1), uptime(1), who(1)


HISTORY

     The w command appeared in 3.0BSD.


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 back-
     ground fork and fail to ignore interrupts.  (In cases where no process
     can be found, w prints ``-''.)

     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.

NetBSD 3.1                     January 11, 2005                     NetBSD 3.1