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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T18:51:45+00:00

I am in a UNIX system administration course at school and have to generate

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I am in a UNIX system administration course at school and have to generate a Cron job that does the following:

  • Queries the system each hour to find
    out who is logged in.
  • Mails the result to my email account.

I know that the actual crontab will look like the following:

# Check to see who is logged in every hour.
MAILTO="me@email.com"
0       *       *       *       *       root    /tmp/loggedin.sh

OR

# Check to see who is logged in every hour.
MAILTO="me@email.com"
@hourly /tmp/loggedin.sh

But I have been Googling for some time and have been unable to find any examples of what exactly the .sh file should look like. I know it starts with:

#!/bin/bash
# Shell script to see who is logged in, to be run every hour.

And I have no idea what else to put in there. Any help is greatly appreciated!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think who should do the trick. It will show you a list of all the users that are logged in to the system at a time. You can write this to a file and then have it mailed to you.

    w would get you what the people logged in are currently doing.

    So, the script would look like: 

    #!/bin/sh  
HOME=<your home directory>
who > ${HOME}/usersLoggedIn.txt  
w > ${HOME}/whatLoggedInUsersAreDoing.txt

    ${HOME} refers to your home directory. On the command prompt, echo $HOME should give you your home directory. The output of the command who and w will get redirected to the files usersLoggedIn.txt and whattLoggedInUsersAreDoing.txt within your home directory. You can, of course, change the directory and file names to which you want this data to be written.

    HTH,
    Sriram

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