Snow Leopard reports other users, but who are they?

Question

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Why there are two users showing in uptime command results?

My MBP reports other users, but I'm the only one using this laptop:

$:> uptime

19:30 up 13 days, 16 mins, 3 users, load averages: 0.38 1.23 1.28

Who are the other 2 users?

Does the "who" command return anything? They're probably just accounts that are running some services for you.. — James T Snell, Jul 18 '11 at 16:43

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 18 '11 at 16:43

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They are just system accounts used for background services. You can view a list of all logged in users with the users command or the who command. Don't be surprised if it lists users more than once, that just means that user account has multiple login sessions running.

You can also use the ps command to view a list of processes running on your system, including which user account each is running under. This might help you get a better picture of what each account is used for.

answered Jul 18 '11 at 16:43

Darth Android

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the users command will not show root or service users, just real, logged in users - which might be what the OP needs, but will still show just one user, not 3. – Traveling Tech Guy Jul 18 '11 at 16:51
@Traveling The one day I don't have access to my nix box is the one day I need to verify command output, go figure. – Darth Android Jul 18 '11 at 18:27
may I recommend Cygwin for your Windows box? That way you are never too far away from the *nix commands :) – Traveling Tech Guy Jul 18 '11 at 23:55
@Traveling Both commands produced an empty line on my cygwin install, and the man pages aren't the most descriptive about this behavior. ;) – Darth Android Jul 19 '11 at 13:50

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 18 '11 at 16:44

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These are not real users. Xserver or printserver or processes.

answered Jul 18 '11 at 16:44

Binarylife

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Why down voted? – Binarylife Jul 18 '11 at 18:18

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 18 '11 at 16:49

Well, one would be your user, another would be 'root' - the user your system uses to run its services. One more might be another service runner. The easiest way to find out would be to run

ps u -A

and look at the first column - it'll tell you who's running what.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 18 '11 at 18:16

The BSD uptime command takes its user count from the utmp database. You can use users, who, w or finger to see all login sessions recorded by utmp.

Most likely, those three entries correspond to three Terminal windows you have opened; SSH and X11 sessions are registered in the same way. (I don't know if utmp applies to graphical logins on Mac OS X, but you can just see for yourself.)

Snow Leopard reports other users, but who are they?

4 Answers4