W

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: local
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NAME

w - display users and processes

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

W is a program which displays an "intelligent" listing of the current users, what they're doing, and how active they are. There are two basic kinds of information displayed: system information and per-user information. An example is shown below.

 10:55pm  up 2 wks 2 days,  4 users
User     tty       login@  idle   JCPU   PCPU what
rhg      tty6     10:36pm        12:20  12:20 csh
robertd  tty7     10:21pm         9:21   9:21 csh
bobw     tty13    10:26pm       160:35 149:43 rn
allbery  tty15     9:47pm        50:22   0:18 sh

The first line displays the current time, how long the system has been up, and the number of users. The other lines display for each user, the user's login name, the terminal the user is on, the time the user logged in, how long the user has been idle, the CPU time used by the current program and total CPU for the login session, and the current program.

FILES

/dev/kmem System memory (the process table)
/dev/mem In-core program images
/dev/swap Swapped program images
/dev Searches for terminals
/etc/utmp Current system users and boot time
/xenix System namelist

NOTES

W displays the process name as shown by ps(1) without the -f argument.

BUGS

JCPU and current process are both kludges. The former is really only the CPU of running programs in the terminal session, as Xenix does not retain user and system times for all programs in a session; the latter attempts to disregard background processes, but it is nearly impossible to successfully determine if a program is in the background or not. This is exacerbated by the fact that VAR csh(1)'s, when available, look suspiciously like background processes because they close their standard input.

If the user block is demand paged, w won't find it; I don't have access to a demand-paged system.

who -u and w have different ideas on what constitutes idle time; one uses time of last input, the other the time of last output.

It is possible that reading the summarized child's system and user times would produce a better approximation of JCPU. This is only likely, however, if the times are updated recursively.

Things can change while w is running; this occasionally causes the current program to be printed as "[can't stat]" or as "[interstice]".

If you want "w" to work correctly, get 4.2BSD.

It should really take options for the system namelist, memory, and swap files.

Because Xenix lacks the appropriate kernel variables, load averages are not available.

CREDIT

Based on a utility written at the University of California at Berkeley. Original written by Brandon S. Allbery. Modified for SCO Xenix 386 by John F. Haugh II (jfh@rpp386).

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 07:09:22 GMT, December 12, 2024

W