SUNWcsu
The fields displayed are: the user’s login name, the name of the tty the user is on, the time of day the user logged on (in hours:minutes), the idle time--that is, the number of minutes since the user last typed anything (in hours:minutes), the CPU time used by all processes and their children on that terminal (in minutes:seconds), the CPU time used by the currently active processes (in minutes:seconds), and the name and arguments of the current process.
example% w 10:54am up 27 day(s), 57 mins, 1 user, load average: 0.28, 0.26, 0.22 User ttylogin@idleJCPUPCPUwhatralph console7:10am110:054:31w
The notion of the ‘‘current process’’ is unclear. The current algorithm is ‘the highest numbered process on the terminal that is not ignoring interrupts, or, if there is none, the highest numbered process on the terminal’. This fails, for example, in critical sections of programs like the shell and editor, or when faulty programs running in the background fork and fail to ignore interrupts. In cases where no process can be found, w prints -.
The CPU time is only an estimate, in particular, if someone leaves a background process running after logging out, the person currently on that terminal is ‘‘charged’’ with the time.
Background processes are not shown, even though they account for much of the load on the system.
Sometimes processes, typically those in the background, are printed with null or garbaged arguments. In these cases, the name of the command is printed in parentheses.
w does not know about the conventions for detecting background jobs. It will sometimes find a background job instead of the right one.