- last command
- who command
who command
You need to use the who command, to print who is logged on. It also displays the time of last system boot. Use the last command to display system reboot and shutdown date and time, run:
$ who -b
Sample outputs:
system boot 2017-06-20 17:41
Use the last command to display listing of last logged in users and system last reboot time and date, enter:
$ last reboot | less
Sample outputs:
Or, better try:
$ last reboot | head -1
Sample outputs:
reboot system boot 4.9.0-3-amd64 Sat Jul 15 19:19 still running
The last command searches back through the file /var/log/wtmp and displays a list of all users logged in (and out) since that file was created. The pseudo user reboot logs in each time the system is rebooted. Thus last reboot command will show a log of all reboots since the log file was created.
Finding systems last shutdown date and time
To display last shutdown date and time use the following command:
$ last -x|grep shutdown | head -1
Sample outputs:
shutdown system down 2.6.15.4 Sun Apr 30 13:31 - 15:08 (01:37)
Where,
- -x: Display the system shutdown entries and run level changes.
Here is another session from my last command:
$ last
$ last -x
$ last -x reboot
$ last -x shutdown
Sample outputs:
Find out Linux system up since…
Another option as suggested by readers in the comments section below is to run the following command:
$ uptime -s
Sample outputs:
2017-06-20 17:41:51
OS X/Unix/FreeBSD find out last reboot and shutdown time command examples
Type the following command:
$ last reboot
Sample outputs from OS X unix:
reboot ~ Fri Dec 18 23:58 reboot ~ Mon Dec 14 09:54 reboot ~ Wed Dec 9 23:21 reboot ~ Tue Nov 17 21:52 reboot ~ Tue Nov 17 06:01 reboot ~ Wed Nov 11 12:14 reboot ~ Sat Oct 31 13:40 reboot ~ Wed Oct 28 15:56 reboot ~ Wed Oct 28 11:35 reboot ~ Tue Oct 27 00:00 reboot ~ Sun Oct 18 17:28 reboot ~ Sun Oct 18 17:11 reboot ~ Mon Oct 5 09:35 reboot ~ Sat Oct 3 18:57
wtmp begins Sat Oct 3 18:57
To see shutdown date and time, enter:
$ last shutdown
Sample outputs:
shutdown ~ Fri Dec 18 23:57 shutdown ~ Mon Dec 14 09:53 shutdown ~ Wed Dec 9 23:20 shutdown ~ Tue Nov 17 14:24 shutdown ~ Mon Nov 16 21:15 shutdown ~ Tue Nov 10 13:15 shutdown ~ Sat Oct 31 13:40 shutdown ~ Wed Oct 28 03:10 shutdown ~ Sun Oct 18 17:27 shutdown ~ Mon Oct 5 09:23
wtmp begins Sat Oct 3 18:57
How do I find who rebooted/shutdown the Linux box?
You need to enable psacct service and run the following command to see info about executed commands including user name. Type the following lastcomm command to see
# lastcomm userNameHere
# lastcomm commandNameHere
# lastcomm | more
# lastcomm reboot
# lastcomm shutdown
## OR see both reboot and shutdown time
# lastcomm | egrep 'reboot|shutdown'
Sample outputs:
reboot S X root pts/0 0.00 secs Sun Dec 27 23:49 shutdown S root pts/1 0.00 secs Sun Dec 27 23:45
So root user rebooted the box from ‘pts/0’ on Sun, Dec, 27th at 23:49 local time.
See also
- For more information read last(1) and learn how to use the tuptime command on Linux server to see the historical and statistical uptime.
19 comment
On my FC5 system instead of
last reboot | head -1
I can type
last reboot -1
Please give a try by your own!! I think it will not work dude.
i couldn’t find out the error. please help me.
#Send list of users logged on to server via email
59 11 * * * last | grep date ‘+%a %b %d’ > /tmp/users.out ; mail -s “Users Logged Today†ephrondiana@gmail.com
when i tried to execute,
$ last |grep date ‘+%a %b %d’
i got no such file or directory error.
Should be..
thanks a lot vivek.i din’t expect this much fast reply.But unfortunately when i execute,
$ last | grep $(date ‘+%a %b %d’)
i couldn’t get anything.Please help
My bad…I forgot to include double quote …
Also you may wanna try out:
HTH
Thanks vivek.its working great…..
the command “last reboot” worked for me, on my mac!
Can we find who rebooted the linux box?
In order to track who rebooted a linux machine, I would:
– disable root logins; many users sharing root is bad
– create a list of sudoers, so only people listed there could shutdown / reboot / halt
– /var/log/messages would contain traces of who ran sudo shutdown -r now or such
Thanks a lot!
I help me!
wtmp is rotated by the system, so the last solution will stop working. I believe the most reliable solution is:
The uptime idea from Sam is nice but really that just returns the uptime (same as the uptime command) in date format.
last | grep USERNAME | grep tty | head -n 1 |awk -F ‘ ‘ ‘{print $7}’
Is there any way to check if the system is currently rebooting? Or shutting down
–
I made a cron job that will reboot the server when a specific file exists (deleting that file too of course)
So that I can use php to make it and signal a reboot when needed
When cron job fires, the few seconds of shutting down will trigger database connection error
So I want to know if there is any standard way of knowing the system is rebooting aside from making another file that existence signals “server is rebooting” (which I don’t know how to delete when server is back up anyway)
Thank u 🙂 for info
Hi!
tuptime is an other command that you can use for get this information. I found it after trying all the typical commands. I think that it covers better this subject that the solutions proposed here
An example, with enumerate option:
# tuptime -e
Startup: 1 at 08:25:03 AM 08/28/2015
Uptime: 14 minutes and 38 seconds
Shutdown: OK at 08:39:41 AM 08/28/2015
Downtime: 6 seconds
Startup: 2 at 08:39:48 AM 08/28/2015
Uptime: 10 minutes and 36 seconds
Shutdown: BAD at 08:50:24 AM 08/28/2015
Downtime: 7 minutes and 16 seconds
Startup: 3 at 08:57:41 AM 08/28/2015
Uptime: 10 minutes and 22 seconds
Shutdown: BAD at 09:08:03 AM 08/28/2015
Downtime: 6 minutes and 12 seconds
Startup: 4 at 09:14:16 AM 08/28/2015
Uptime: 1 minutes and 7 seconds
Shutdown: BAD at 09:15:23 AM 08/28/2015
Downtime: 2 minutes and 35 seconds
Startup: 5 at 09:17:59 AM 08/28/2015
Uptime: 1 minutes and 15 seconds
Shutdown: BAD at 09:19:14 AM 08/28/2015
Downtime: 8 hours, 32 minutes and 8 seconds
Startup: 6 at 05:51:23 PM 08/28/2015
Uptime: 2 days, 16 hours, 53 minutes and 19 seconds
Shutdown: BAD at 10:44:42 AM 08/31/2015
Downtime: 22 hours, 13 minutes and 17 seconds
Startup: 7 at 08:58:00 AM 09/01/2015
Uptime: 7 hours, 23 minutes and 51 seconds
Shutdown: OK at 04:21:51 PM 09/01/2015
Downtime: 11 seconds
Startup: 8 at 04:22:03 PM 09/01/2015
Uptime: 41 seconds
Shutdown: OK at 04:22:44 PM 09/01/2015
Downtime: 6 seconds
Startup: 9 at 04:22:51 PM 09/01/2015
Uptime: 4 minutes and 11 seconds
Shutdown: OK at 04:27:02 PM 09/01/2015
Downtime: 5 seconds
Startup: 10 at 04:27:08 PM 09/01/2015
Uptime: 1 days, 16 hours, 14 minutes and 32 seconds
System startups: 10 since 08:25:03 AM 08/28/2015
System shutdowns: 4 ok – 5 bad
Average uptime: 11 hours, 19 minutes and 27 seconds
Average downtime: 3 hours, 6 minutes and 12 seconds
Current uptime: 1 days, 16 hours, 14 minutes and 32 seconds since 04:27:08 PM 09/01/2015
Uptime rate: 78.49 %
Downtime rate: 21.51 %
System uptime: 4 days, 17 hours, 14 minutes and 35 seconds
System downtime: 1 days, 7 hours, 2 minutes and 1 seconds
System life: 6 days, 0 hours, 16 minutes and 37 seconds
The repository is located at: https://github.com/rfrail3/tuptime
Regards,
Seriously? No one came up with a simple ‘uptime -s’ ?
Thanks for the comments. The post has been updated.