Man Linux: Main Page and Category List

NAME

       whowatch - console, interactive, process and users monitoring tool.

DESCRIPTION

       Whowatch  is an console, interactive users and process monitoring tool.
       It displays information about the users  currently  logged  on  to  the
       machine, in real-time.  Besides standard informations (login name, tty,
       host, user’s process), the type of the connection (ie. telnet  or  ssh)
       is  shown.   Display  of  users  command line can be switch to tty idle
       time.  Certain user can be selected  and  his  processes  tree  may  be
       viewed  as  well as tree of all system processes. Tree may be displayed
       with additional column that  shows  owner  of  each  process.   In  the
       process  tree  mode  SIGINT  and  SIGKILL  signals  can  be sent to the
       selected process. Killing processes  is  just  as  simple  and  fun  as
       deleting lines on the screen.

       Whowatch  has  no  command  line  options  or  configuration file.  All
       actions are performed in real time by pressing following keys:

       Users list mode:

       ’up’ ’down’
              cursor movement

       ’i’    toggle between user command line and idle time

       ’c’    full command line on/off. Disabling full command line  can  save
              CPU  time.   It  can  give  you also some additional information
              about process executable.

       ’enter’
              view selected user’s processes tree.

       ’t’    all system processes (init tree)

       Tree mode:

       ’up’ ’down’
              cursor movement

       ’enter’
              go back to users list

       ’o’    show processes owners

       ’c’    full command line on/off. Disabling full command line  can  save
              CPU  time.   It  can  give  you also some additional information
              about process executable.

       ’Ctrl-I’
              send INT signal to selected process

       ’Ctrl-K’
              send KILL signal to selected process

PLUGINS

       Whowatch has ability to load plugin during program run.  Plugin  prints
       information  inside details window.  Plugins gives flexibility: if some
       specific information about process,  user  or  system  is  needed  then
       separate  program  could  be written to obtain such information.  Since
       there are three kinds of deatils  window  (process,  user  and  system)
       maximum  three  plugins can be loaded.  Whowatch has very simple API to
       write plugins.

FILES

       Program reads /var/log/wtmp, /var/run/utmp. Under  Linux  program  also
       reads  files  from  /proc directory. Without read access to these files
       whowatch funcionality will be limited or program will not even start.

SEE ALSO

       finger(1) ps(1), pstree(1), top(1), w(1), lsof(8), kill(1) killall(1)

BUGS

       Because lack of ut_pid in utmp and wtmp  structures  in  *BSD  systems,
       program  tries  to  obtain  pid of a login shell by analizing processes
       controlling terminal and processes names. Under some conditions it  may
       lead  to  incorrect  results ie. there will be incorrect processes tree
       associated with user’s session.

AUTHOR

       Michal Suszycki <mike@wizard.ae.krakow.pl>,
       http://wizard.ae.krakow.pl/~mike
       Tree functions written by Jan Bobrowski <jb@wizard.ae.krakow.pl>,
       http://wizard.ae.krakow.pl/~jb

                                  27 Feb 2000