1W(1)                        General Commands Manual                       W(1)
2
3
4

NAME

6       w, uptime  - who is on and what they are doing; system time up
7

SYNOPSIS

9       w [ -hswu ] [ user ]
10       uptime
11

DESCRIPTION

13       W  prints  a  summary  of the current activity on the system, including
14       what each user is doing.
15
16       The uptime invocation prints only the header line.
17
18       The heading line shows the current time of day, how long the system has
19       been up, the number of users logged into the system, and the load aver‐
20       ages.  The load average numbers give the number  of  jobs  in  the  run
21       queue averaged over 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
22
23       The  fields  output  are: the users login name, the name of the tty the
24       user is on, the time of day the user logged on, the number  of  minutes
25       since  the user last typed anything, the CPU time used by all processes
26       and their children on that terminal, the CPU time used by the currently
27       active processes, the name and arguments of the current process.
28
29       The  -h flag suppresses the heading.  The -s flag asks for a short form
30       of output.  In the short form, the tty is abbreviated, the  login  time
31       and cpu times are left off, as are the arguments to commands.
32
33       The  -w  and  -u  flags  force  the  w and uptime actions respectively,
34       regardless of the name the program is invoked as.
35
36       If a user name is included, the output will be restricted to that user.
37

FILES

39       /var/run/utmp       for login names
40       /dev/swap           secondary storage
41

SEE ALSO

43       finger(1), ps(1), who(1)
44

AUTHOR

46       Mark Horton
47

BUGS

49       The notion of the ``current process'' is muddy.  The current  algorithm
50       is  ``the highest numbered process on the terminal that is not ignoring
51       interrupts, or, if there is none, the highest numbered process  on  the
52       terminal''.   This fails, for example, in critical sections of programs
53       like the shell and editor, or when faulty programs running in the back‐
54       ground  fork and fail to ignore interrupts.  (In cases where no process
55       can be found, w prints ``-''.)
56
57       The CPU time is only an estimate, in particular, if  someone  leaves  a
58       background  processs running after logging out, the person currently on
59       that terminal is ``charged'' with the time.
60
61       Background processes are not shown, even though they account  for  much
62       of the load on the system.
63
64       Sometimes  processes,  typically  those  in the background, are printed
65       with null or garbaged arguments.  In these cases, the name of the  com‐
66       mand is printed in parentheses.
67
68
69
703rd Berkeley Distribution                                                 W(1)