Many shell commands exist to help you monitor the system. The last command shows you which users have logged in most recently or when a specified user last logged in to your system. The id command enables you to determine which groups a particular user has access to, or to determine the short name for a user given their user ID (UID). Mac OS X systems maintain many log files. Viewing log files on your system or on another system using ssh can help you troubleshoot any number of problems. The command tail -n 10 /Library/Logs/Software\ Update.log displays the ten most recently installed software updates. The command tail -f /var/log/system.log displays the current contents of the system log, then continues to print new lines as they are added to the file. |