W(1) FreeBSD General Commands Manual W(1)
NAME
w - display who is logged in and what they are doing
SYNOPSIS
w [--libxo] [-dhin] [-M core] [-N system] [user ...]
DESCRIPTION
The w utility prints a summary of the current activity on the system,
including what each user is doing. The first line displays the current
time of day, how long the system has been running, the number of users
logged into the system, and the load averages. The load average numbers
give the number of jobs in the run queue averaged over 1, 5 and 15
minutes.
The fields output are the user's login name, the name of the terminal the
user is on, the host from which the user is logged in, the time the user
logged on, the time since the user last typed anything, and the name and
arguments of the current process.
The following options are available:
--libxo
Generate output via libxo(3) in a selection of different human
and machine readable formats. See xo_options(7) for details on
command line arguments.
-d dumps out the entire process list on a per controlling tty basis,
instead of just the top level process.
-h Suppress the heading.
-i Output is sorted by idle time.
-M Extract values associated with the name list from the specified
core instead of the default /dev/kmem.
-N Extract the name list from the specified system instead of the
default /boot/kernel/kernel.
-n Do not attempt to resolve network addresses (normally w
interprets addresses and attempts to display them as names).
When -n is specified more than once, hostnames stored in utmp are
attempted to resolve to display them as network addresses.
If one or more user names are specified, the output is restricted to
those users.
FILES
/var/run/utx.active list of users on the system
EXAMPLES
Show global activity of the system:
$ w
8:05PM up 35 mins, 3 users, load averages: 0.09, 0.35, 0.27
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT
fernape v0 - 7:30PM - tmux: client (/tmp/tmux-1001/default) (tmux)
root v1 - 8:03PM 1 -bash (bash)
fernape pts/0 tmux(1391).%0 8:04PM - w
Show the entire process list per tty:
$ w -d
8:12PM up 42 mins, 3 users, load averages: 0.01, 0.11, 0.17
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT
1199 login [pam] (login)
1207 -bash (bash)
1507 tmux: client (/tmp/tmux-1001/default) (tmux)
fernape v0 - 7:30PM - tmux: client (/tmp/tmux-1001/default) (tmux)
1488 login [pam] (login)
1489 -bash (bash)
root v1 - 8:08PM 3 -bash (bash)
1510 -bash (bash)
1515 w -d
fernape pts/0 tmux(1509).%0 8:11PM - w -d
Same as above but only for the root user and omitting the heading:
$ w -d -h root
1183 login [pam] (login)
1204 -bash (bash)
root v1 - 7:15PM - -bash (bash)
COMPATIBILITY
The -f, -l, -s, and -w flags are no longer supported.
SEE ALSO
finger(1), ps(1), uptime(1), who(1), libxo(3), xo_options(7)
HISTORY
The w command appeared in 3.0BSD.
BUGS
The notion of the "current process" is muddy. The current algorithm is
"the highest numbered process on the terminal that is not ignoring
interrupts, or, if there is none, the highest numbered process on the
terminal". This fails, for example, in critical sections of programs
like the shell and editor, or when faulty programs running in the
background fork and fail to ignore interrupts. (In cases where no
process can be found, w prints `-'.)
The CPU time is only an estimate, in particular, if someone leaves a
background process running after logging out, the person currently on
that terminal is "charged" with the time.
Background processes are not shown, even though they account for much of
the load on the system.
Sometimes processes, typically those in the background, are printed with
null or garbaged arguments. In these cases, the name of the command is
printed in parentheses.
The w utility does not know about the new conventions for detection of
background jobs. It will sometimes find a background job instead of the
right one.
FreeBSD 15.1-STABLE-HBSD September 11, 2025 W(1)