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Accepted
Alice
Asked: 2019-01-17 01:32:31 +0800 CST

Display all the working terminals

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I opened 4 terminals but when check them with who or w

me@alpha:~$ w
 17:28:19 up  3:09,  1 user,  load average: 0.51, 0.35, 0.34
USER     TTY      FROM             LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
me :0       :0               14:20   ?xdm?   3:27   0.01s /usr/lib/gdm3/gdm-x-session --run-script env GNOME_SHELL_SESS
me@alpha:~$ who
me   :0           2019-01-16 14:20 (:0)

It display only one termianl called ':0'

if on macos it will display

me at mbp in ~
$ who
me  console      2019-01-04 08:57
me  ttys000      2019-01-04 08:57
me  ttys001      2019-01-04 08:57

How could display all the terminal ?

command-line tty who

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The issue is due to how certain terminals work. In particular, sakura and gnome-terminal (Ubuntu's default) which I have used before do not register the terminal. There is, in fact, a bug report for gnome-terminal, which is closed with WONTFIX status.

    Finding number of open terminal sessions, therefore, should be focused on finding parent processes of shell sessions or associated pts/tty devices, as shown in this question:

    $ ps -eo tty= | sort -u

    The only issue with this command is that it should display processes from all users. My personal approach would be to filter out my own processes ( i.e. terminals I opened myself ) via -u option and parse with awk:

    #  Note that this includes tabs as well, not just open windows
$ ps -u $USER -o tty | awk 'NR>1 && $1 != "?" {a[$0]++};END{for(val in a) print val}'
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