Collecting information about logged in users, boot logs, and boot failures

Collecting information about the operating environment, logged in users, the time for which the computer has been powered on, and boot failures are very helpful. This recipe will go through a few commands used to gather information about a live machine.

Getting ready

This recipe will introduce commands who, w, users, uptime, last, and lastb.

How to do it...

1. To obtain information about users currently logged into the machine use:

   $ who
   slynux   pts/0   2010-09-29 05:24 (slynuxs-macbook-pro.local)
   slynux   tty7    2010-09-29 07:08 (:0) 
   

   This output lists the login name, the TTY used by the users, login time, and remote hostname (or X display information) about logged in users.

   Note

   TTY (the term comes from TeleTYpewriter) is the device file associated with a text terminal which is created in /dev when a terminal is newly spawned by the user (for example, /dev/pts/3). The device path for the current terminal can be found...