Get working directory of logged in users

Question

w lists all logged in users. Is there any way to get the working directory for the logged in users?

Answer 1

The current working directory is a property of each process, not of users.

On Linux, you can get the current working directory of a process of id $pid by doing a readlink() on /proc/$pid/cwd for instance by using the readlink/realpath command or the :a/:A/:P glob qualifiers in zsh. Unless you're superuser, that only works for your own processes though (the current working directory like what other file a process is currently accessing is a potentially sensitive information).

$ ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 9467 pts/1    00:00:00 zsh
14074 pts/1    00:00:00 ps
$ readlink /proc/9467/cwd
/usr/local
$ printf '%s\n' /proc/9467/cwd(:P)
/usr/local

More portably, you can use lsof:

$ lsof -ap 9467 -d cwd
COMMAND  PID     USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF   NODE NAME
zsh     9467 chazelas  cwd    DIR  253,0     4096 786604 /usr/local

Then you can combine it with -u user instead of -p pid to get the cwd of all the processes running as that user:

sudo lsof -au user -d cwd

On some systems, like FreeBSD, sudo (to run the command with superuser privileges) is not required as access to that information is not restricted there.