When I type who
in terminal I get this output:
$USER tty2 2017-01-12 12:50 (:1)
What does this smiley (:1)
mean ?
Sometimes this smiley looks like (:0.0)
. What does it mean in this case?
Where is an overview about these different brackets?
Best Answer
As you can find out in the manpage by typing
man who
, you can enable column headings with the-H
option:I have to agree this is not very helpful though, and the manpage also doesn't contain any explanation of the values.
However, I think I can tell you what these columns mean anyway:
NAME
is the username of each logged in user.LINE
seems to contain the TTY through which the user is logged in (TTY1-6 are terminals, TTY7-12 are used by the X display server to show graphical desktops; you switch between them using Ctrl+Alt+F1 - F12).TIME
is the date and time when the user logged in to their current session.COMMENT
in our cases shows the content of the$DISPLAY
environment variable (normally:0
) in braces, which is also used by the X display server. Only graphical TTYs should have such a value, this column is empty for me on the terminal TTYs.You can check the value of this variable using the command
echo $DISPLAY
. What exactly it means is described e.g. in What does DISPLAY=:0.0 actually mean? and What is DISPLAY=:0?.