whowatch: Don’t just take my word for it

In the wake of wpe and we yesterday, I thought for sure today’s program would seem dull by comparison. After all, wpe more or less walked away with all the judges’ accolades, and without batting an eye.

But not to be outdone, here’s whowatch:

Different area, but no less panache. whowatch takes on the task of monitoring logged-in users, and showing what they are up to. And it does it with considerable finesse.

The default display is rather mundane, with just the who-esque list of users logged on to your system. But asking for the tree display, or listing ownership, or focusing only on one user’s activity gives you new displays, each with their own set of submenus and details. And suddenly whowatch is a gold mine.

whowatch doesn’t stop there though, with system information and load averages as part of its default display. So you could, conceivably, rely on whowatch as your system monitor as well. Not that there aren’t plenty of lightweight monitors out there to supplement whowatch, but it’s still a nice touch.

Admittedly whowatch is of very little use to me, as most of its power is probably uninteresting to single-user system. But whowatch would be particularly useful on systems that accept remote logins or accommodate multiple users. I also noticed that whowatch is clever enough to break down multiplexer sessions, so things like screen are listed as multiple entries for each pane. And from there, the details continue.

And given that there’s a control-key combination to kill a process — CTRL+K, which just sounds satisfying 👿 — it might be useful to keep whowatch installed if you’re an administrator.

whowatch is in both Debian and Arch, and it’s easy to see why. whowatch is part of Arch’s Community repo, which is sort of like an offhand endorsement by Arch that a program is really that good. So don’t just take my word for it. 😉

This is well deserving of a gold star: ⭐ Wow, two days and two stars. Is this a trend … ?!