User's Login date and login time

Question

I want to fetch user's login time and login date, is there any command in Unix providing User's login date and User's login time ? this problem i want to perform in Shell-script where username is accepting from the end-user and after checking the availability of user, i would like to fetch that user's login time and login date in different variable and then display using 'echo' command.

Answer 1

For past logins:

last "$USER_NAME"

Also, the command who lists current logins.

If you're looking for the date of the user's last login, some systems provide it directly, for example lastlog -u "$USER_NAME" on Linux or lastlogin "$USER_NAME" on FreeBSD. It's also available in the output of finger, but not in an easy-to-parse form. In any case, it's available in the output of last (on many unix variants, last -n 1 "$USER_NAME" shows the last login; otherwise you can do last "$USER_NAME" | head -n 1). Note that last login may not correspond to the last logout (e.g. a user remained connected from one origin for a long time and made a quick network login recently).

Answer 2

On linux, last -R $username | awk '/still logged in/ {print $3,$4,$5,$6}' will return nothing if the user is not logged in, otherwise a date/time list for each active session.

Other unixes that don't know the -R option to last (which supresses the hostname) will need some modification.