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How would I be able to find logs of recent login or usage activity on my desktop? Is there a script or place in Ubuntu that holds data that tells you of recent logins from user, guest, or remote.

user11153
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user3638942
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3 Answers3

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Actually, the best tool is the command last

last

You can pipe the output to less 

last | less

or a file and then search the file.

Panther
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You can show login history of user-accounts as following:

Go to System Settings > User Accounts and click on History button

login-history

history-screen

From Command-line Open terminal and type: last

Usage: last [-num | -n num] [-f file] [-t YYYYMMDDHHMMSS] [-R] [-adioxFw] [username..] [tty..]

Ex: last pandya for activity of user=pandya

For more information see man last

last, lastb - show listing of last logged in users

FILES:
/var/log/wtmp
/var/log/btmp

Also Visit:how-can-i-track-who-sshes-into-my-linux-machine & Log SSH activity

Community
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Pandya
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The file /var/log/auth.log is most likely what you are looking for. The messages look like the following for local logins:

Jun  3 21:09:57 johnserver login[1810]: pam_unix(login:session): session closed for user johndoe

and like so for remote logins:

Jun  3 21:16:53 johnserver sshd[949]: Accepted password for johndoe from 127.0.0.1 port 54425 ssh2

where johnserver is the hostname and johndoe is the username.

I am sorry that I do not have any knowledge on how guest logins are displayed/conveyed.

CameronNemo
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