Question

5

What does idle time output from "w" command tell?

rated 0 times [ 5] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 6433 / 2 Years ago, sat, march 5, 2022, 10:53:13

I want to know if can safely shutdown my computer at home, by testing to see if my flatmate is using it. Therefore i use the command "w" in terminal. However the Idle time for tty seems strange (note I don't know much about linux or what tty means).

For example, a test of "w" command on my work machine shows that the idle time of my session is 14days? But i am using it now... this is something I don't understand.

w

USER  TTY   FROM  LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT

me    tty7  :0    09Apr13 14days  1:41m  3.07s gnome-session --session=ubuntu

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answered 2 Years ago ingwhin · Accepted Answer

The idle time is supposed to tell how long it has been since the user typed any input on that terminal. For Xwindows sessions, it is broken since Xwindows never reads input from a terminal, but instead gathers input directly from your mouse and keyboard, so the terminal never gets its timestamp updated since it is never read from.