I have logged in from tty6, then logged out. Now, executing the w
command from a terminal inside unity
gives the following output:
mark@mark-Latitude-D620:~$ w
19:27:19 up 2:40, 3 users, load average: 0.41, 0.61, 0.46
USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT
mark tty7 16:47 2:39m 5:06 0.22s gnome-session -
mark pts/2 :0.0 19:13 7.00s 0.30s 0.00s w
Isn't the command supposed to list only the logged in users? I am using Ubuntu 12.10.
Edit
Note that the w
command reports that 3 users are logged in (in the header) but only shows 2 entries.
Best Answer
There's nothing surprising about this
w
output. If you look at the second column under theTTY
heading, it says the two logins are fromtty7
(nottty6
!) andpts/2
. Nowtty7
is your graphical log in (see theWHAT
column) andpts/2
is a pseudo-terminal device which is the terminal emulator you opened to run thew
command (again, see theWHAT
column).Update
It seems that the wrongly reported number of users can occur sometimes when your
/var/run/utmp
, whichw
makes use of, is corrupt.The solution I found suggested on the Internet is to truncate this file (perhaps in single-user mode) and retry logging in:
Proceed with caution, though, it is suggested that users logged in while you nuke
/var/run/utmp
will experience "weirdness", which is why people recommend you do this in single-user mode.Sources