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I'm writing a bash script that disconnects idle sessions but writes to the tty a few seconds before terminating it to make sure it really is not being used.

The format for write is write user [tty].

I'm starting with a tty string, i.e "pts/1".

I know I can find the user next to the tty name in "who" and "w", but am uncertain of how to put the username (i.e john) in a variable. Would this require a regex? I was originally looking for a single command but who and w don't have such options in their documentation.

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  • ttys=$(who | awk '{print $2}'); echo $ttys
    – Cyrus
    Dec 14, 2014 at 17:30

1 Answer 1

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This should work. It uses stat to extract the username of the owner of the pseudo-tty. Here, $pts should be in the format in the question, eg. pts/2. 

tty_user=$(stat -c%U /dev/$pts)
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