HOWTO: Find Out Who Else is Logged on to my Machine?
While malware, spyware, and virii aren’t generally problems for GNU/Linux users, there’s always some residual paranoia when moving over from Windows. Until you become comfortable enough with your system, it’s natural to want to know if someone has ssh’d or telnetted in to your system.
The quickest way to tell who’s on your system at any moment is to open a terminal window, become root, and type:
who
This will give you a quick and dirty view of who’s logged on right now. There are many command line options for the who command – use man who to check them out.
Hopefully, you’ll only see you!
I have a PC with xp. I use a login screen to sign in. there are no guest sign in’s as this is my private home office computer. My cable internet comes into my office & through a router (for my laptop) then directly into my computer. (there is only one computer with cable access & my lap top is not used much)
Problem: sometimes at my log in screen, I get a message that states “someone else is logged on to this computer”. Does this mean they are accessing my internet or actually my computer data? How can I tell who. what, where & why?
Hi Debbie,
Sorry, this is a Linux blog. I don’t know much about Windows
how can I know whether somebody has logged in in my computer using ssh or sftp?
ditto to sangeet’s question, as who/w/finger don’t display logged on sftp/ftp users. (they work for ssh though).
Sure, i can check /var/log/secure but this is difficult to get a quick “who’s on now” look at things.
Thanks
Thanks, this was useful…