Who

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The command who typed at the command line in a terminal will show a list of people logged in at the moment. The format of this list is:

  • Login name,
  • Which terminal they are logged in to,
  • And at what date and time they logged in.

who -r will show you the current run level

Example

Mostly, you will find some unexplainable logins on your system, like the following if you are logged in once:

$ who
root     :0           Dec  3 11:31
root     pts/0        Dec  3 11:32
root     pts/1        Dec  3 11:36
$

These login needn't be hackers hijacking your computer. Find it out with who -Hi:

$ who -Hi
who: Warning: -i will be removed in a future release;   use -u instead
NAME     LINE         TIME         IDLE          PID COMMENT
root     :0           Dec  3 11:31   ?          3268
root     pts/0        Dec  3 11:32 00:13        3690
root     pts/1        Dec  3 11:36   .          4320
$ ps -A | grep 3268
 3268 ?        00:00:00 startkde
$ ps -A | grep 3690
 3690 ?        00:00:03 kded
$ ps -A | grep 4320
 4320 pts/1    00:00:00 bash

In this case, all root logins can be explained by KDE and the bash. So, there is no hacker on your system.

More info

You can try a special variant of the command that produces different output on some distributions.

$ who am i

Kick out users

Now we come to the fun part - kicking out users. For that, we just kill their login processes. In the following example, the user kicks out himself:

$ who -Hi
who: Warning: -i will be removed in a future release;   use -u instead
NAME     LINE         TIME         IDLE          PID COMMENT
root     pts/0        Nov 26 10:47   .         19483 (p54a951f3.dip.t-dialin.net)
root     pts/1        Nov 26 10:44   ?          1957 (p54a951f3.dip.t-dialin.net)
$ kill -9 19483
Connection to myvps closed.
scorpio:~ #

Provided by

Most (all?) Linux distributions incorporate this from the GNU Coreutils: and use its man page

Related Commands

All of these relate to user information.

  • id - dump UID and GID information.
  • logname - show the login name.
  • whoami - show effective user ID.
  • groups - show groups of the current user.
  • users - show who is logged in.

See also

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