I just missclicked w in terminal and… discovered new command?

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noisyboy@reddit

There is also write and wall - the former allows you to send a message to another user's terminal and wall allows you to do the same to ALL logged in users. Combined with banner, you could have some fun (or get into trouble).

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gt40mkii@reddit

man w

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Salivala@reddit

For the w

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hubbardg2035@reddit

No bc my cat discovered this for me yesterday

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SpaceCadet2000@reddit

New? That's ancient Unix magic.

Even our old AIX boxes back in the 1990s had that.

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Mister_Magister@reddit (OP)

not new as in it is new but new as in I wasn't aware of it. Basic english. Calm your ego

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SpaceCadet2000@reddit

Basic english. Calm your ego

Take your own advice friend.

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moopet@reddit

My first experience with SunOS was like that. I tried all sorts of 1-, 2- and 3-letter combinations until I discovered "man", and then someone told me I could look in the bin directory to find other commands. Then I was off to the races.

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negval@reddit

My cat does it all the time.

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omenosdev@reddit

Tools with similar default status dumps, not overall functionality:

$ w
$ who
$ loginctl    # for folks with systemd

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ShakaUVM@reddit

Also whoami

And who am i

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Ruiz_Francisco@reddit

They type these commands in the beginning of Tron 2

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rednets@reddit

See also: last: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/last.1.html

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pancakeQueue@reddit

Last is sorted by most recent login in descending order. So to get the most recent users only I always have to go last | head

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omenosdev@reddit

Only issue with last is needing elevated privileges to run (at least on the distros I've used).

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rednets@reddit

Hmm, it works fine for me as a normal user on Fedora and Ubuntu. /var/log/wtmp seems to be globally readable on both.

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gre4ka148@reddit

also works for me on arch, normal user

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nickram81@reddit

Why is systemd so fucking weird?

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omenosdev@reddit

How so? Running any of those three commands without any extra arguments produce similarly tailored information. loginctl, as its name suggests, can actually manage user sessions.

I wouldn't describe systemd as weird, it's often straightforward. Some of its commands produce output resembling or including information of existing tools which helps in transitioning, but ties them into to a larger unified system management infrastructure.

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JDGumby@reddit

Running any of those three commands without any extra arguments produce similarly tailored information.

Not really. Quite a different format for each

terminal:~$ w
 07:24:26 up 55 min,    1 user,    load average: 0.12, 0.23, 0.15
USER         TTY      FROM                  LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
jdgumby     tty7     :0                       06:29    55:26  27.72s  0.13s   xfce4-session

terminal:~$ who
jdgumby     tty7         2025-09-02 06:29 (:0)

terminal:~$ loginctl 
SESSION  UID USER     SEAT  TTY
         c2 1000 jdgumby seat0

1 sessions listed.

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gmes78@reddit

loginctl is the command line interface to logind. This is consistent across pretty much every single systemd tool.

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pugmilamber@reddit

you should also try: pinky

it is the updated alternative to the venerable finger you used to be able to type "finger me" on linux distros and get information about yourself . . . i'm pretty sure that went away the year of the linux desktop (the first one)

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Own_Ad2169@reddit

I fingered myself and it shows that I have no plan and no mail.

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pancakeQueue@reddit

pinky -l will show the .project and .plan files if users on a multi user system have them. Fun place to put Easter eggs.

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SuAlfons@reddit

"the first one", laughed way too hard at this 🤣

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paulodelgado@reddit

I remember going through each letter of the alphabet and hitting to figure out all the commands by that letter... then doing "man "... ah those were the days.

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DividedContinuity@reddit

I was happy the day i discovered compgen -c

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agentrnge@reddit

I was unpleased when I found out that on Cisco and other IOS-like devices that w is shorthand for write running config to storage. Was habit to do when logging into a system at start of troubleshooting to check load/users. Womo womp. Lol

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Mister_Magister@reddit (OP)

I love that normal people would think "iOS? Like the apple os?" and you mean IOS the cisco os on the switches/routers xd

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Savafan1@reddit

I remember using that 30 plus years ago on servers in college to see who was logged in. I don’t think I’ve used it recently though.

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laminarflowca@reddit

In the good old days we could finger people too. Even at other institutions. I remember remote fingering some of my friends.

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lelddit97@reddit

thats how you know the male to female ratio back then was approaching infinity

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blackmesaind@reddit

You trying to say we weren’t fingering dudes back then? I know that’s not true..

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mrtruthiness@reddit

Yes. I was trying to find my sister's e-mail address back in the mid-80's and was using that command. She had recently started work for Sandia National Labs. Security at Sandia let me know that I should stop what I was doing.

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roelschroeven@reddit

When you fingered someone, you didn't just see whether someone was logged in, but you could also see the contents of a file named .plan that each user could create.

John Carmack used that to keep a kind of blog (before the name blog even existed). You could finger him and find out his latest piece about coding.

Good old days indeed.

Or you could finger an organization instead of a person (say @idsoftware.com instead of johnc@idsoftware.com) and get a list of usernames. Unthinkable these days.

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TheCrustyCurmudgeon@reddit

Ahhh.. the memories...

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Journeyj012@reddit

Aw gee, sounds like you love fingering

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StochasticCalc@reddit

Uhh

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adrianmonk@reddit

That and who and the even more amazing rwho which showed who was logged in on every machine on the network.

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biffbobfred@reddit

Same. Solaris.

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ChocolateDonut36@reddit

I accidentally typed sl and a choo choo appeared

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Gositi@reddit

Yeah that one's good

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natermer@reddit

Have you figured out what 'wall' is for?

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IntergalacticLaxativ@reddit

Have you seen the left bracket "[" command?

# ls -l /usr/bin/[

-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 45056 Jul 7 17:00 '/usr/bin/['

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deux3xmachina@reddit

That's because if [ -x /bin/bash ]; then echo found it; fi isn't purely shell syntax. It's evaluating the return code of test in the if condition. It's the same as writing test -x /bin/bash && echo found it, where test/[ ignores the last argument if it's ].

Definitely surprising when you first discover it.

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PM_ME_BONER@reddit

It actually is pure shell syntax today in any POSIX shell. test is a builtin since a long, long time.

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cathexis08@reddit

It's still technically required by posix to exist as a stand-alone binary in addition to the built-in which is always a bit surprising. So is cd though at least in the case of test it's actually useful.

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IntergalacticLaxativ@reddit

Yeah. When I removed it I was a young and learning sysadmin on a VAX 11-750 running 4.2 BSD. It truly broke a lot of stuff. Ahh good times, good times.

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FromTheThumb@reddit

It's a hard link to the test command.

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bubblegumpuma@reddit

On most systems I've used nowadays where it isn't a shell builtin it's a symlink to test - there's a clue for anyone wondering what this is about :)

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OptimalSide@reddit

Use it all the time professionally as its way shorter than typing out uptime

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djphazer@reddit

Literally the first thing I type every time I log in to my home server

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OptimalSide@reddit

Why not add it to your .bashrc so you get it every time you log in...

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carlwgeorge@reddit

Same exact reason it became muscle memory for me.

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cloudTank@reddit

W

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FromTheThumb@reddit

lastlog

Is helpful too.

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Xzaphan@reddit

I do C-z all the time by mistake. It take me weeks to understand what it actually doing!

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Mister_Magister@reddit (OP)

If you don't know yet, learn ctrl+d (it does same thing as exit)

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kalam_burgud@reddit

Nice, now try typing: write and hit enter :-)

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Mister_Magister@reddit (OP)

>write: you have write permission turned off

brother turned off my writing permissions

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kalam_burgud@reddit

wall okidoki

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midgaze@reddit

On systems without a bunch of crap from packages polluting /bin and /usr/bin (basically BSD) you can learn a lot from checking the contents of these directories. On (most?) linux distros there's too much noise in there for it to be of much use.

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HighKing81@reddit

I had to check for active users so often that it was the first thing I did after logging in... automatically. 99% of the time I didn't even need it. It was something I did without thinking.

I quit my IT job two years ago. Still do it sometimes when I login to my homeserver that no one else uses haha

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femuuuu@reddit

You're not the only one. That's how I found about it too lol

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someweirdbanana@reddit

same lol

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screwdriverfan@reddit

Well damn. That's a... w.

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Picorims@reddit

So many easter eggs possible...

a : waves at you b : prints a bee f : prints the pay respect meme u : "me ?" y : prints the whole history of GNU/Linux z : faints putting the device to sleep (probably not a good idea...)

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AkelGe-1970@reddit

z is a utility you can install to do fuzzy cd. The real tool is called zoxide, there is also zsh-z for zsh users

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vitimiti@reddit

None of those are standard, just like sl giving you a sarcastic error or forgetting your sudo password insulting you, they are extensions (if they exist at all)

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ruby_R53@reddit

i wonder where those are from, 'cos i don't have them here on Gentoo

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definitive_solutions@reddit

Manjaro zsh neither

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Picorims@reddit

It's all made up, they do not exist.

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ruby_R53@reddit

i guess it comes from the commenter's head then xd

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Snoo_4704@reddit

But we can make them live with aliases 💯

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ruby_R53@reddit

or scripts, rather, which still shouldn't be hard to make

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East_Nefariousness75@reddit

Now that you know who is logged in, try out $ wall

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SmartCustard9944@reddit

W discovery

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kompiler@reddit

I remember learning about this way back when first learnt how to finger users.

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throwaway490215@reddit

Yesterday and some kid told you that's a 'w'?

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firedocter@reddit

I like to think of it as who what where when (not in that order)

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whosdr@reddit

Read the source to find out How!

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Tempus_Nemini@reddit

it works!!! just wow ))

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GirthyPigeon@reddit

It's a shortcut for who. Also, try cowsay, oneko, yes and cmatrix.

cowsay - Displays a cow speaking your message.
oneko - shows Neko on your command line.
yes - Automatically answers "yes" where the command requires you to type it in to agree.

Source

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Mister_Magister@reddit (OP)

why lie? no it is not?

```

\~/t/diff$ who
foidbgen seat0        2025-08-25 17:19 (:0)
foidbgen tty2         2025-08-25 17:19 (:0)
\~/t/diff$ w
02:53:25 up 7 days, 9:35, 1 user, load average: 3.85, 3.46, 2.99
USER     TTY      FROM             LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
foidbgen tty2     -                25Aug25 7days 4:49m 0.03s

```

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