How to find which users are currently logged in?
The easiest method to find who is logged on to your system is the use the who
command, a part of the gnu coreutils package. It can be used as an ordinary user with no options or with my own favored option which enhances readability:
andrew@ilium~$ who -H
NAME LINE TIME COMMENT
andrew tty1 2016-05-06 07:34
andrew@ilium~$
At times you may see yourself or other users apparently logged in more than once with the use of pts/0
and pts/1
in place rather than tty1
, This indicates a 'Pseudo Terminal Slave' (= pts) and simply shows that you or another user have opened an application such as xterm
, sshd
or similar process that creates a pseudoterminal master and slave pairing.
More information concerning pts
in the referenced AskUbuntu thread, and the man page link from within the accepted answer:
- AskUbuntu: What does “pts/” in the output of w mean?
- pts(4) - Linux man page
All of these answers are excessively bloated. Three characters for a command? Please.
The fastest way to find who's logged on and doing what is:
$ w
You can use the command users
to see who is currently logged in.
Take care.