This article is written by Hari Haran.
 
As a system administrator, you may want to know who is on the system at any give point in time. You may also want to know what they are doing. In this article let us review 4 different methods to identify who is on your Linux system.

1. Get the running processes of logged-in user using w

w command is used to show logged-in user names and what they are doing. The information will be read from /var/run/utmp file. The output of the w command contains the following columns:

• Name of the user
• User’s machine number or tty number
• Remote machine address
• User’s Login time
• Idle time (not usable time)
• Time used by all processes attached to the tty (JCPU time)
• Time used by the current process (PCPU time)
• Command currently getting executed by the users

 
Following options can be used for the w command:

• -h Ignore the header information
• -u Display the load average (uptime output)
• -s Remove the JCPU, PCPU, and login time.

 

$ w
 23:04:27 up 29 days,  7:51,  3 users,  load average: 0.04, 0.06, 0.02
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
ramesh   pts/0    dev-db-server        22:57    8.00s  0.05s  0.01s sshd: ramesh [priv]
jason    pts/1    dev-db-server        23:01    2:53   0.01s  0.01s -bash
john     pts/2    dev-db-server        23:04    0.00s  0.00s  0.00s w

$ w -h
ramesh   pts/0    dev-db-server        22:57   17:43   2.52s  0.01s sshd: ramesh [priv]
jason    pts/1    dev-db-server        23:01   20:28   0.01s  0.01s -bash
john     pts/2    dev-db-server        23:04    0.00s  0.03s  0.00s w -h

$ w -u  23:22:06 up 29 days,  8:08,  3 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
ramesh   pts/0    dev-db-server        22:57   17:47   2.52s  2.49s top
jason    pts/1    dev-db-server        23:01   20:32   0.01s  0.01s -bash
john     pts/2    dev-db-server        23:04    0.00s  0.03s  0.00s w -u

$ w -s
 23:22:10 up 29 days,  8:08,  3 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
USER     TTY      FROM               IDLE WHAT
ramesh   pts/0    dev-db-server        17:51  sshd: ramesh [priv]
jason    pts/1    dev-db-server        20:36  -bash
john     pts/2    dev-db-server         1.00s w -s

2. Get the user name and process of logged in user using who and users command

who command is used to get the list of the usernames who are currently logged in. Output of the who command contains the following columns: user name, tty number, date and time, machine address.

$ who
ramesh pts/0        2009-03-28 22:57 (dev-db-server)
jason  pts/1        2009-03-28 23:01 (dev-db-server)
john   pts/2        2009-03-28 23:04 (dev-db-server)

 
To get a list of all usernames that are currently logged in, use the following:

$ who | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq
john
jason
ramesh

 

 

 

Users Command

users command is used to print the user name who are all currently logged in the current host. It is one of the command don’t have any option other than help and version. If the user using, ‘n’ number of terminals, the user name will shown in ‘n’ number of time in the output.

$ users
john jason ramesh

3. Get the username you are currently logged in using whoami

whoami command is used to print the loggedin user name.

$ whoami
john

 
whoami command gives the same output as id -un as shown below:

$ id -un
john

 
who am i command will display the logged-in user name and current tty details. The output of this command contains the following columns: logged-in user name, tty name, current time with date and ip-address from where this users initiated the connection.

$ who am i
john     pts/2        2009-03-28 23:04 (dev-db-server)

$ who mom likes
john     pts/2        2009-03-28 23:04 (dev-db-server)

Warning: Don't try "who mom hates" command.

Also, if you do su to some other user, this command will give the information about the logged in user name details.

4. Get the user login history at any time

last command will give login history for a specific username. If we don’t give any argument for this command, it will list login history for all users. By default this information will read from /var/log/wtmp file. The output of this command contains the following columns:

• User name
• Tty device number
• Login date and time
• Logout time
• Total working time

$ last jason
jason   pts/0        dev-db-server   Fri Mar 27 22:57   still logged in
jason   pts/0        dev-db-server   Fri Mar 27 22:09 - 22:54  (00:45)
jason   pts/0        dev-db-server   Wed Mar 25 19:58 - 22:26  (02:28)
jason   pts/1        dev-db-server   Mon Mar 16 20:10 - 21:44  (01:33)
jason   pts/0        192.168.201.11  Fri Mar 13 08:35 - 16:46  (08:11)
jason   pts/1        192.168.201.12  Thu Mar 12 09:03 - 09:19  (00:15)
jason   pts/0        dev-db-server   Wed Mar 11 20:11 - 20:50  (00:39

 
This article is written by Hari Haran. He is working in bk Systems (p) Ltd, and interested in contributing to the open source. The Geek Stuff welcomes your tips and guest articles.