Mac Forum / General / General / May 2008

In article
<69340953-4565-4436-a14a-b3bbba770074@p25g2000pri.googlegroups.com>,

See the "last" man page.

Here are four commands that should tell if someone is _currently_ on:

Indigo:~ userid2  $ last | grep logged
userid1   ttyp3                     Tue May 27 20:10   still logged in
userid1   console  Indigo.local     Tue May 27 19:07   still logged in
userid2   ttyp2                     Mon May 26 15:25   still logged in
userid1   ttyp1                     Mon May 26 12:42   still logged in
userid1   ttyp0                     Sat May 24 16:27   still logged in

Indigo:~ userid2  $ w
21:13  up 3 days, 12:48, 4 users, load averages: 0.22 0.26 0.28
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@  IDLE WHAT
userid1  p0       -                Sat16   2days -
userid1  p1       -                Mon12   31:48 -
userid2  p2       -                Mon15   29:32 -
userid1  p3       -                20:10       - w

Indigo:~ userid2  $ who
userid1  ttyp0    May 24 16:27
userid1  ttyp1    May 26 12:42
userid2  ttyp2    May 26 15:25
userid1  ttyp3    May 27 20:10

Indigo:~ userid2  $ finger
Login    Name                 TTY  Idle  Login  Time   Office  Phone
userid2  Ze Admin             p2     1d  Mon    15:25
userid1  The Papa             p0     2d  Sat    16:27
userid1  The Papa             p1     1d  Mon    12:42
userid1  The Papa             p3         Tue    20:10

Without the grep, 'last' can also be analyzed to identify how long ago
someone logged out.  (Though I'm not really sure why that matters for
doing a shutdown.)

Unfortunately, all four are unreliable, at least in 10.3.9--NO ONE
was logged in on this machine this morning, yet it claims one has
been logged in since yesterday and another for three days.

There have been no crashes nor shutdowns to explain this.

Your question here is not exactly the same as the question in the
subject line.  The subject line question:

Indigo:~ wgroleau$ ps -auxww | grep Finder
userid1   784   0.0  1.6   100092  10280  ??  S     7:07PM   0:02.01
/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder
-psn_0_10223617

What you need to look at is the idle timer, but I think the only
way you'll be able to do that for a GUI session is by hacking its
location.  On the other hand, if just sleeping the computer would
suffice (that drops the power consumption quite a bit), then that
is build into the os, and uses the same idle timer.  You can set
the length of idle time until going to sleep in the Energy Saver
section of the System Preferences.

Sleeping is also kinder - work in progress may be affected by
killing apps for a forced shutdown, while sleep is generally
not fatal to anything.

You should test going to sleep with the actual apps running that
would be in the middle of the night, too - there are a few that
prevent it working...

Billy Y..

Yeah, the worlds energy crisis can be traced down to these here macs.

Obviously you are up to something else but generally on any unix system, the
following commands will clue you in...

who

last | more

ps -fu username

That last one may not work on pre 10.5 systems, somewhere down the line they
changed ps from the bsd style to svr4 style so ymmv. Another ymmv is with
the last command, although I can't say it's traditionally broken, it relies
on another file called wtmpx (or wtmp) which isn't always updated properly.
You may see a "still logged in" from a connection six months ago but usually
the data at the top (first displayed) is fairly accurate.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com