Is it possible to hide users from the 'who' and 'w' commands?
 

Is it possible to omit users from being displayed with the 'who' and 'w' commands? Like for instance, I would like to omit the 'root' users from being displayed.

According to the man page, I can't find anything on omitting a user, however you can specify a user:
w user username

So:
w user masterc
would tell you if I was logged into your machine and where :)

Cool

Yeah, but I'd like to omit users like 'root', so I can maintain my system while the users log in. I don't want them to know that I'm logged in.

Better yet, is there a source code for the 'w' or 'who' commands? I know a little programming, so maybe I can modify it and recompile it.

Nevermind. I thought of an ingenius way to do it! ;)

Any insight? :)

Well a hack would be to alias the command to a shell script that pipes the output to a sed for root which deletes it before displaying the list to the user. The users don't know the difference.

heh. that's what I was thinking while reading this thread. But I was thinking maybe a simple grep -v

or a root kit

--V