WYNTK: UNIX System Admininistrator

You can find out what other users are doing with ps.

The ps command shows you processes that are running on the system. Usually, you use ps just to learn what you’re doing, but you can also use it to show all processes, or all processes associated with another user. So you can use ps to find out who’s doing what.

The options to ps are very system-dependent. But on our system (which is BSD-based), I can see what other users are doing using the ps -au command. (I pipe the output through more because ps typically shows screenfuls and screenfuls of output.) On a System V-based system, I would use ps -ef instead.

Hidden agenda

I sent out mail to our office on how to do:

who | sort | more

to check on how many logins you currently had.

I was secretly hoping (since the system was very slow) that people with seven logins would realize that everyone could see what they were doing, be embarrassed at the exposure of their own excessive use of resources, and would change their behavior.

It worked, with a few people.

Linda Lamb

% ps -au | more
USER   PID  %CPU %MEM  SZ  RSS TT STAT START  TIME COMMAND
len   18217 29.7  0.9  740 1040 s4 R  10:46  0:00 gtroff
ellen 18205 24.2  0.6  240  756 q5 R  10:45  0:04 perl — #
bobbi 16257  0.0  0.2  188  264 s7 I  10:15  0:00 -csh
val   15290  0.0  0.1   48  120 q4 I  14:52  0:00 less
val    5993  0.0  0.1   92  172 q9 I  Oct 18 0:00 -sh
dom   16451  0.0  0.1   48  100 s5 I  10:22  0:00 rlogin rock
fred    653  0.0  0.1  216  156 p4 I  Oct 12 0:02 spider

Len is running gtroff, Ellen is running perl, Dom is logged in to another ...