The anatomy of uptime&w commands on OpenBSD

On OpenBSD, uptime and w are actually the same program:

$ ls -lt /usr/bin/uptime /usr/bin/w
-r-xr-xr-x  2 root  bin  18136 May 30 12:53 /usr/bin/uptime
-r-xr-xr-x  2 root  bin  18136 May 30 12:53 /usr/bin/w

and the source code is usr.bin/w/w.c.

Compare the outputs of uptime and w:

$ uptime
10:59AM  up 7 days,  1:51, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
$ w
10:59AM  up 7 days,  1:51, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
USER    TTY FROM              LOGIN@  IDLE WHAT
root     p0 10.217.242.57     9:10AM     0 w

You can see the uptime just displays the first line of w, and w also shows the login users’ information.

w uses clock_gettime to get system up time:

if (clock_gettime(CLOCK_BOOTTIME, &boottime) != -1) {
    ......
}

and getloadavg to retrieve system load average int the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes:

int
getloadavg(double loadavg[], int nelem)
{
    ......
    mib[0] = CTL_VM;
    mib[1] = VM_LOADAVG;
    size = sizeof(loadinfo);
    if (sysctl(mib, 2, &loadinfo, &size, NULL, 0) < 0)
        return (-1);
    ......
}

The current user login information is kept in /var/run/utmp, and it is composed of utmp struct:

struct utmp {
    char    ut_line[UT_LINESIZE];
    char    ut_name[UT_NAMESIZE];
    char    ut_host[UT_HOSTSIZE];
    time_t  ut_time;
};

utmp.ut_line is the login terminal (remove “tty” prefix); utmp.ut_name is the login user name; utmp.ut_host is the login address and the utmp.ut_timeis the login time. These are the first 4 columns of every line:

USER    TTY FROM              LOGIN@  IDLE WHAT
root     p0 10.217.242.57     9:10AM     0 w

The IDLE column displays how long has passed since you last operates on terminal:

if ((ep->idle = now - stp->st_atime) < 0)
        ep->idle = 0;

and WHAT shows the current process.

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