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FreeBSD system uptime how to

How to show the uptime of a FreeBSD system? When was the last reboot? These questions are answered in this blog post. Sometimes you just want to know for how long your system has been running. FreeBSD provides some tools to get you this info. These are presented in this blog post.

Requirements

The following requirements have to be in place to be able to implement what is described in this post:

Tools overview

FreeBSD has the following tools in its base system to provide information about how long the system has been running:

  • uptime: show how long system has been running
  • last: show shutdown and boot times
  • who: show last system boot

uptime

The uptime tool displays the current time, the length of time the system has been up, the number of users, and the load average of the system over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

$ uptime
12:38PM  up 7 days, 19:03, 1 users, load averages: 0.91, 0.84, 0.80

last

The last utility can show shutdown and boot times of your system:

$ last reboot
boot time                                  Tue Jun  6 17:36
boot time                                  Sun Jun  4 22:29
shutdown time                              Sun Jun  4 10:20
boot time                                  Fri May 26 16:40
shutdown time                              Fri May 26 10:49
boot time                                  Thu Apr 20 10:41
shutdown time                              Thu Apr 20 10:41
boot time                                  Wed Apr 19 20:17
shutdown time                              Wed Apr 19 22:17
boot time                                  Wed Apr 19 11:32
shutdown time                              Wed Apr 19 11:32
boot time                                  Wed Apr 19 11:11
shutdown time                              Fri Apr 14 15:29
boot time                                  Fri Apr 14 15:19

utx.log begins Fri Apr 14 15:19:37 CEST 2017

who

The who utility can show the date and time of the last system reboot:

$ who -b
      system boot  Jun  6 17:36

Resources

Some (other) resources about this subject:

Updated: August 10, 2018