W(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual W(1) NAME w, uptime - who is on and what they are doing; system time up SYNOPSIS w [ -hswu ] [ user ] uptime DESCRIPTION _W prints a summary of the current activity on the system, including what each user is doing. The _u_p_t_i_m_e invocation prints only the header line. The heading line shows the current time of day, how long the system has been up, the number of users logged into the sys- tem, 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 users login name, the name of the tty the user is on, the time of day the user logged on, the number of minutes 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 -h flag suppresses the heading. The -s flag asks for a short form of output. In the short form, the tty is abbre- viated, the login time and cpu times are left off, as are the arguments to commands. The -w and -u flags force the _w and _u_p_t_i_m_e actions respec- tively, regardless of the name the program is invoked as. If a _u_s_e_r name is included, the output will be restricted to that user. FILES /var/run/utmp for login names /dev/swap secondary storage SEE ALSO finger(1), ps(1), who(1) AUTHOR Mark Horton 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 Printed 11/26/99 1 W(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual W(1) 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 pro- cess can be found, _w prints ``-''.) The CPU time is only an estimate, in particular, if someone leaves a background processs 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. Printed 11/26/99 2