Understanding "who" command

arnuld · 01-02-2009, 06:05 AM

There is something strange with who command. when I run it on my machine it shows me all logins of X-Terminals but when I run it on my friend's UBUNTU machine, it shows only the tty login, nothing of the X-terminals:

Code:

[saurabh@cobra ~]$ who
saurabh  tty1         Jan  2 13:05
saurabh  :0           Jan  2 10:08
saurabh  pts/1        Jan  2 10:09 (:0.0)
saurabh  pts/2        Jan  2 10:10 (:0.0)
saurabh  pts/3        Jan  2 10:10 (:0.0)
saurabh  pts/4        Jan  2 11:12 (:0.0)
saurabh  pts/5        Jan  2 11:12 (:0.0)
saurabh  pts/6        Jan  2 16:39 (:0.0)
saurabh  pts/7        Jan  2 17:21 (dune)
[saurabh@cobra ~]$

First login is the original tty login and the pts logins are the X-terminals that my friend have opened on CentOS 4. The last one pts/7 is the SSH I have done into that machine. Now see the output from Ubuntu machine:

Code:

sumit@sumit:~$ who
sumit    :0           2009-01-02 10:10
sumit    pts/2        2009-01-02 17:25 (192.168.0.228)
sumit@sumit:~$

See ? first one is the tty login of my friend and 2nd one is my SSH login and there is no information of the X-terminals he has opened. He was using 2 gnome-terminal(s) when I ran this command. How can I get that information of the opened X-Terminals on his machine ?

I want to use that information on so that I can write onto his terminal and start chatting with him. That way we do not need any messenger software

Isix · 01-02-2009, 07:33 AM

I have noticed this in my case as well. My guess is that when you do "who" on the local machine one sees your terminal sessions, and when done on the remote machine it shows the tty logins. Could you ask your friend to do a "who" on his site, then we see what he gets in comparison to your "who" on his machine --- sounds interesting for my newbieness.

Regards,
Isak