What's happening on Bama? Is my friend logged on right now?

There are a variety of commands which can help you find out what is happening on Bama. The most informative about who is logged on is finger. The output from finger looks like this :

Login     Name         TTY       Idle     When       Where 
furbl001  Joe.Furble   *pts/2    2:56     Mon 10:27  bama.ua.edu 
answe005  Pat.Answer   *pts/31            Mon 11.4   130.160.4.114 
... 

The first column will show names of users logged on, the second column shows their full name. Another column of interest is "Idle", which shows how long it has been since the user has entered a keystroke. In the example, Joe Furble has not used the keyboard for 2 hours and 56 minutes. He may have left himself logged in but gone away. The last column shows where the user is located (by internet address).

When you are on Bama you can email a user simply by using their Login as the address.

You can find out more about any user, not just those who are logged on by

finger <account-name>

Where <account-name> is the the users login (see output from finger) or even your own login account name. You can add a project or plan to your own entry under finger by putting files called .project (only one line of text) and .plan (as many lines of test as you like) in your home directory. Try doing this with the pico editor.

pico .project (that really is a period as the first character.)

pico .plan

Want to know how much work Bama is currently doing? Try this

uptime

Uptime will tell you how long it has been since the machine was last restarted, how many users are logged on, and something called the load average. The load average is the average number of jobs in the run queue over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes. A lower number means that few big jobs are being run.

Want to know even more about who is on and what they are doing? Try "who" or "w". To learn more about what these commands do, type

man who
or
man w

 

© 1998, The University of Alabama. The information included here is for the University of Alabama central computing facility as it was configured on the document date. It may or may not apply to other Unix systems.