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Unix for Advanced Users

5. Navigating effectively

5.6. Who else is on? What are people doing?

5.6.1. who

If you want to shut the computer down, communicate quickly with a friend, or are worried about intruders logging on as root, you might want a list of all users logged on to your machine. The who command will print such a list. In its simplest form, who prints a user's name once for every time that user is logged in (so that one user may have many entries), along with the session's tty (without the /dev/ path prefixed) and the date the session began. Since it reports the date, who can be useful for checking on runaway sessions.

5.6.2. w

Some Unix systems provide another command, w, that can be used to list not only users, but the processes they are running. Each user may be listed several times, once per process. w also lists statistics about CPU usage. w is especially useful for tracking down so-called zombie processes--ones that persist even after they should have died--and killing them by hand.

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