Get the name of the physically (on front of pc) logged in user, reliably!

Question

w, who, id and whoami are excluded, because they only give information about users using a tty. Is there a way to extract the name reliably from KDM?

You write "the logged in user" as if Unix were a single-user system. Are you assuming there is only one display, and no remote access? — tripleee, Jul 09 '13 at 13:23

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 09 '13 at 11:53

What about the commands users and last.

users

   users - print the user names of users currently logged in to the current host

Makes use of the /var/run/utmp and /var/log/wtmp files.

last

   last, lastb - show listing of last logged in users

Makes use of the /var/log/wtmp log file. Shows historically the last time a user logged in.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 09 '13 at 11:13

1

You could use the auth-log for getting this information.

Example for CentOS5: aureport -l another possibility is using the last command.

answered Jul 09 '13 at 11:13

Nils

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 29 '13 at 11:48

1

All those command do not track users that don't use a TTY.

The magic command is loginctl (systemd).

edited Nov 29 '13 at 11:48

Stephen Ostermiller

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answered Jul 22 '13 at 10:31

ManuelSchneid3r

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Get the name of the physically (on front of pc) logged in user, reliably!

3 Answers3

users

last