FreeBSD Find out who is logged in?

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: January 28, 2007]

Q. How do I find out who is logged in and what they are doing?

A. On a FreeBSD, many users will be sharing the same system. If you want to find out if your friend or a coworker is logged in or not on FreeBSD, then you can use following commands.

Please note that following commands works with Linux and other UNIX like oses.

Task:Display who is on the system

To display who is on the system type following command at shell prompt:

$ who
$ who | grep vivek
$ who | less

The who utility displays information about currently logged in users. By default, this includes the login name, tty name, date and time of login and remote hostname if not local.

Task: Find out what user doing

You use w command to display who is logged in and what they are doing:

$ w

You can use the last utility to display either list the sessions of specified users, ttys,
and hosts, in reverse time order, or list the users logged in at a specified date and time.