How do I list all users logged into Gnome 3?

Question

I use Gnome 3 and I have 2 desktops on it (2 users). Both of them are logged simultaneously and I navigate between desktops via Switch User option.

Sometimes, my other desktop won't load and I kill that user via pkill -KILL -u username command.

Now, I have more users but when I try who the console does not display other user. How can I see which users are logged into Gnome3 in the same time?

Answer 1

Try:ck-history --last

This will include users who logged in via Gnome / GDM. I found that commands like 'who', 'w', 'finger', 'last' only display terminal logins.

Answer 2

You can try the following command:

sudo who -u -d

This should show you all logged in users - even the ones with dead processes.

Answer 3

A logged in user will be running a process gnome-session-ctl. Assuming that keeps running when you switch user, so you can look for that and get its owner:

pgrep gnome-session-c | xargs ps u | awk '/gnome-session-ctl/{print $1}' | grep -v gdm

Note:

• Linux stores only 15 chars of the process executable name directly with the process, hence pgrep can only look for gnome-session-c. Anything longer needs a lookup; ps gives us that lookup - and the user name.
• gnome-session-ctl can appear as an argument to another process, so casually grepping ps for gnome-session-ctl without additional filtering may get false positives.
• Excluding the gdm user is a safety net just in case gdm ever starts a ctl process - you probably don't want to kill gdm! Maybe overkill but better safe than sorry.
• Note that you could also go after some other gnome process such as gdm-x-session or gdm-session-worker.