Determine server idle time via command line?

Would top give you what you want?

Jeff

Mine looks like:
Processes: 91 total, 3 running, 88 sleeping... 278 threads 18:07:05
Load Avg: 0.32, 0.31, 0.31 CPU usage: 4.9% user, 15.4% sys, 79.7% idle
SharedLibs: num = 177, resident = 40.1M code, 4.94M data, 9.01M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 8458, resident = 146M + 15.4M private, 117M shared
PhysMem: 58.5M wired, 187M active, 235M inactive, 481M used, 30.3M free
VM: 4.96G + 123M 38430(0) pageins, 196(0) pageouts


Above includes a % idle.
But I see you are looking for idle time, so this may not be at all what you need.

Jeff

What exactly do you mean by 'idle?'

Various daemons will use tiny slices of time on a constant basis.

Are you interested in finding out how long a particular user has been idle? How long since the http daemon has served up a page in response to a request?

The only command that I am aware of is "w". It gives the idle time of a logged user (in the shell). I do not know if this is what you want.
On the other hand, a server is never actually idle.

Mihalis.

Dual G5 @ 2GHz Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Message was edited by: Mihalis Tsoukalos

to what end?

The xserve by default ships with no video card. It is perfectly possible to NEVER have any physical user activity of the kind one sees on a workstation.

I think I'm not quite understanding the situation.

Are your users logged in to the console of a Server?

Or are you looking for some server technology to monitor user behavior?

As has been noted, the unix command w will give you idle time. But that's not all that helpful in determining if your users are 'doing their work' A low idle time could indicate idle fiddling with the mouse, the keyboard, working hard on an excel spreadsheet, chatting via iChat, surfing for **** or any number of things.

Similarly, long idle time could mean answering an important phone call, thinking about a difficult problem, taking a coffee break, or drooling over internet ****.

Users could even write scripts to create 'activity' for energy saver or w to see.

If your organization allows for more intrusive observation of users, ARD would allow you to observe the console of users' machines.

For some reason, I'm feeling helpful even after being shouted at.

Quick google search yeilds the following on the 4th link of the first page in the results:

echo $((`ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | sed -e '/HIDIdleTime/!{ d' -e 't' -e '}' -e 's/.* = //g' -e 'q'` / 1000000000))

all on one line.