My username mentioned twice in who command

Rocky Linux General
1

Hi I am a home user (and by no means a systems administrator whatsoever) of Rocky 8.8 Workstation with Gnome desktop.

I noticed by chance today that I had 2 users running on my system.

I do not know much about Linux users but I ended up running the “w” command that gave the following output when Firefox is running:

USER     TTY      FROM             LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT
main     seat0    login-           17:22    0.00s  0.00s  0.00s /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session --register-session gnome-session
main     tty2     tty2             17:22    8:01   2:50   0.21s /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox -contentproc -childID 28 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 30120 -prefMapSiz

I would like to ask the following:

  • Is it ok to have my username being mentioned twice? IE this is not a hack into my system or anything?

  • I assume “/gdm-wayland-session --register-session gnome-session” represents me logged into Rocky and this is normal - is this correct?

  • I dont understand why there would be a second instance of my username associated with “/usr/lib64/firefox/firefox” - I would assume there would be a single user “main” that is running firefox, not firefox running as second instance of my user name. Is this ok / normal? Is there anything to be concerned about here?

Thanks ahead of time…

2

Likely nothing to be worried about, provided running “loginctl” shows you as the single actual user on the system.

It’s totally normal to see your username listed more than once, depending on which utility you use to check things, whether or not you’re using a graphical desktop (such as Gnome, in your case), and whether or not you have terminals (command line) open.

As you’ve tried running the “w” command, and hopefully also the “loginctl” command by now, try the “who” command next – even different details there :grinning: (w and who are not the same!)

I’ve no idea why firefox would be listed as well–perhaps it a Gnome thing? I haven’t used it in many years, so unsure on that question.

For more info on the seat/session terminology, check out this article on multiseat at freedesktop.org .

In any case, have fun!

1 Like
3

@LinuxGuy1997 thanks very much for your help :slight_smile:
I ran:
loginctl
and got:

SESSION  UID USER SEAT  TTY 
      2 1000 main seat0 tty2

1 sessions listed.

Which seems to me that there is one user main that has a seat and TYY associated with it - please let me know if I am wrong about how I am interpreting that.

I will study up more and seats and other things.

Thanks again.

4

Yes, that’s all that means – no need to worry. :+1: