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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | ENVIRONMENT | FILES | BUGS | REPORTING BUGS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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W(1) General Commands Manual W(1)
w - Show who is logged on and what they are doing.
w [option ...] [user]
w displays information about the users currently on the machine,
and their processes. The header shows, in this order, the current
time, how long the system has been running, how many users are
currently logged on, and the system load averages for the past 1,
5, and 15 minutes.
The following entries are displayed for each user: login name, the
tty name, the remote host, login time, idle time, JCPU, PCPU, and
the command line of their current process.
The JCPU time is the time used by all processes attached to the
tty. It does not include past background jobs, but does include
currently running background jobs.
The PCPU time is the time used by the current process, named in
the "what" field.
-c, --container
show the container uptime instead of system uptime in the
header.
-h, --no-header
Don't print the header.
-u, --no-current
Ignores the username while figuring out the current process
and cpu times. To demonstrate this, do a su and do a w and
a w -u.
-s, --short
Use the short format. Don't print the login time, JCPU or
PCPU times.
-t, --terminal
Usually w will use either the systemd sessions table or the
utmp file to locate users. In terminal mode w will scan
the terminal devices and locate user sessions this way.
This is not a true count of users, for example a user with
two xterms will show up twice, so the user count in the
header will be different. Currently terminal devices
scanned are /dev/tty* and /dev/pts/*.
-f, --from
Toggle printing the from (remote hostname) field. The
default as released is for the from field to not be
printed, although your system administrator or distribution
maintainer may have compiled a version in which the from
field is shown by default.
--help Display help text and exit.
-i, --ip-addr
Display IP address instead of hostname for from field.
-p, --pids
Display pid of the login process/the "what" process in the
"what" field. The login process is also called the session
leader.
-V, --version
Display version information.
-o, --old-style
Old style output. Prints blank space for idle times less
than one minute.
user Show information about the specified user only.
PROCPS_CONTAINER
If $PROCPS_CONTAINER is set, then w behaves as if the
--container option has been given.
PROCPS_USERLEN
Override the default width of the username column.
Defaults to 8.
PROCPS_FROMLEN
Override the default width of the from column. Defaults to
16.
/var/run/utmp
information about who is currently logged on, only for non-
systemd hosts.
/proc process information
/dev/tty* , /dev/pts/*
Terminal device files scanned with --terminal mode.
When using --terminal option, w assumes processes with a parent
PID of 0 or 1 are
Idle time for users on certain sessions, such as X/Wayland
sessions, will be incorrect. The --terminal option will show the
correct idle times for terminal sessions on X/Wayland.
agetty(8) processes and will not display them. This is prone to
both false postive and negative errors.
Please send bug reports to ⟨procps@freelists.org⟩.
free(1), loginctl(1), ps(1), top(1), uptime(1), who(1), utmp(5),
agetty(8)
This page is part of the procps-ng (/proc filesystem utilities)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/blob/master/Documentation/bugs.md⟩.
This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps.git⟩ on 2025-08-11. (At that
time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2025-07-30.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
procps-ng 2025-05-29 W(1)
Pages that refer to this page: tload(1), top(1), uptime(1), utmpdump(1)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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