find out who you logged onto the machine as -- and not just who you are now

who am i

In my work environment, we log onto the servers as our user ('user', in the sample ouput), and 'sudo su - root' to other accounts. This trick allows us to return the account name we logged in as -- and not the account name we currently are ('root', in this example). Using this trick, you can build other commands: Set your CVSROOT env variable to your account name: CVSROOT=$(who am i | awk '{print $1}')@cvs.server.example.com:/cvsroot SCP a file to another server: scp file.txt $(who am i | awk '{print $1}')@some.other.server.com:. This works out great in my environment, as we can include this in our documentation and make the comands more easy to copy/paste for different users, and not have to set all sorts of variables, or modify the docs for each user. whoami gives you the name of the user you currently are, not the user you logged on originally as. who gives you a listing of every single person logged onto the server. who am i gives you the name of the user you logged on as, and not who you changed to with su. Look at the following scenario: whoami user su - # whoami root # who am i user pts/51 2009-02-13 10:24 (:0.0) whoami != who am i

Sample Output

user  pts/51       2009-02-13 10:24 (:0.0)

-18

By: ozymandias

2009-02-20 16:26:11

who

1 Alternatives + Submit Alt

get current tty name

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/03/4-ways-to-identify-who-is-logged-in-on-your-linux-system/
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-8

who am i

kev · 2011-12-23 03:30:47 8

What Others Think

so is there a shell that this actually works on? Maybe you mean 'whoami' ?

bartman · 792 weeks ago

or maybe just 'who' ?

bartman · 792 weeks ago

Those are actually all distinct. 'who am i' gives you just the line of the 'who' output that relates to your current session. whoami gives you your current username and who gives you the complete list of logged in users including terminal time and origination info. As a side note, the critical thing is the *number* of arguments to 'who' and the 'am i' is just used as a mnemonic device. In face it's faster to type who o o which does the same thing. Still, not really a 'Fu' command, though.

adminzim · 792 weeks ago

@adminzim who o o usage: who [-HmqsTu] [am I] [file] whoami grep also works

grep · 792 weeks ago

bartman whoami gives you the name of the user you currently are, not the user you logged on originally as. who gives you a listing of every single person logged onto the server. who am i gives you the name of the user you logged on as, and not who you changed to with su. Grep, look at the following scenario: whoami user su - #whoami root #who am i user pts/51 2009-02-13 10:24 (:0.0) whoami != who am i

ozymandias · 792 weeks ago

bartman, Also, this seems to work on the following machines -- and I just confirmed : RHEL3,4,5, (and CentOS), Fedora 8,9,10, Debian Etch, Sid, Ubuntu 7.10, 8.4, 8.10, 9.04 alpha, Solaris 9, 10, all with bash. I tested ksh on the RHEL3,4,5, Fedora, and Solaris hosts, and they all worked in my test environment. I am not sure what shell/OS you are using, or if we perhaps installed some package on all these, but I doubt it.

ozymandias · 792 weeks ago

On Debian/Lenny, it seems that it does not work if I run it from an xterm. If I ssh in, it works. In both cases running just 'who' works.

bartman · 791 weeks and 6 days ago

bartman, When I run who, I get output for each user logged on with no indication of which one 'I' am...

ozymandias · 791 weeks and 6 days ago

@grep [zim@host ~]$ who o o zim pts/4 2009-02-20 14:33 (:0.0) gnu coreutils.

adminzim · 791 weeks and 6 days ago

seofox · 127 weeks ago

rahimhh21 · 85 weeks and 3 days ago

Perfecthomepugs · 77 weeks and 2 days ago

pugpuppies95 · 39 weeks and 2 days ago

donperi1 · 33 weeks ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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