What is a "non-option argument"?

The terminology is not completely fixed, so different documentation uses different terms, or worse, the same terms with different meanings. The terminology in the man page you're reading is a common one. It is the one used in the POSIX standard. In a nutshell, each word after the command is an argument, and the arguments that start with - are options.

Argument

In the shell command language, a parameter passed to a utility as the equivalent of a single string in the argv array created by one of the exec functions. An argument is one of the options, option-arguments, or operands following the command name.

Operand

An argument to a command that is generally used as an object supplying information to a utility necessary to complete its processing. Operands generally follow the options in a command line.

Option

An argument to a command that is generally used to specify changes in the utility's default behavior.

“Utility” is what is generally called “command” (the standard uses the word utility to avoid ambiguity with the meaning of “command” that includes the arguments or even compound shell commands).

Most commands follow the standard utility argument syntax, where options start with a - (dash a.k.a. minus). So an option is something like -a (short option, follows the POSIX guidelines) or --all (long option, an extension from GNU). A non-option argument is an argument that doesn't begin with -, or that consists solely of - (which who treats as a literal file name but many commands treat as meaning either standard input or standard output).

In addition, some options themselves have an argument. This argument can be passed in several ways:

• For a single-letter option, in the same argument to the utility: foo -obar: bar is the argument to the single-letter option -o.
• In the GNU long argument syntax, in the same argument, separated by an equal sign: foo --option=bar.
• In a separate argument: foo -o bar or foo --option bar. If the option -o (or --option) takes an argument, then bar is the argument of the option -o (or --option). If -o (or --option) does not take an argument then bar is an operand.

Here's a longer example:

tail -n 3 myfile

-n is an option, 3 is an argument to the option -n, and myfile is an operand.

Terminology differs, so you may find documents that use argument in the sense where POSIX uses operand. But “non-option argument” is more common than either term for this meaning.

The thing is, options (or switches or flags, whatever you like to call them) count as arguments too. In fact, anything you supply after the command name itself makes up the command's arguments (except for constructs used by the shell like redirection, for instance).

Your program/script receives everything together as arguments and needs to separate the option arguments (arguments that are options) from other... you guessed it!... non-option arguments.

So what the info page is saying is that if who receives an argument that is not an option, it will consider that as an alternative to the default file it consults for log in information.