When you look at a "w" screen and see somebody doing "more"
what does it mean?  Since more is a file reader, don't
you have to type "more filename"?  If you just type "more"
you aren't doing anything.  Just curious.

5 responses total.

More is a filter, and what they're reading is probably the output of some
other command.  Very likely they're reading mail or Picospan or something
with it piped through more - either by them explicitly, or by Picospan or
a mail program, via a pager setting.

(Moreover, when people are running several processes, for example via pipes,
w is only going to give you one of them.  If you're desperate to find out
what someone's doing, you can probably do something like 
ps -aux, grep'ing for the username you want.  (ps may have an option for
this.)

Yes, I frequently pipe output of various programs through more.
It hadn't occured to me that it would only show "more" to a w
command, though.

Don't think the ps here has that option, but you can list all the processes
running on a particular terminal by using with -t option, which will do
the same thing in most cases; e.g.

        ps -t01

will show you all process controlled by tty01.

...

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss