Let me begin by saying I want to do this every 10 seconds and running the commands 'who' or 'finger' are in my opinion too slow, taking about 20 seconds/day to do the job. Makes me wonder if there might be a faster way, possibly via perl, that might get it done in 5 or 10 seconds. It may just be that there are too many internal system structures to transverse to get this data, but I thought I'd ask anyway.
-mark

who and finger take too long ??? ...

try 'w' ?

I tried 'w' as well and it was even slower. If anyone is curious why I'm being so anal about this is I'm the author of collectl and one of the ways I'm able to sample hundreds of counters every 10 seconds at less then 0.1% cpu and in some cases come closer to 0.01% is by being very careful. I'm sure the expense of actually having to run an image is contributing to the problem. For example I even wrote my own 'cat' routine because I can open/search a file quicker than having to run another program. Of course for most cases 'cat' and 'who' are just fine and it's only when you run them a LOT that the overhead actually turns into something real.
-mark