What does "Still Running" mean (Linux)?

Question

$ last -x reboot
reboot system boot 4.4.0-46-generic Mon Nov 14 12:15 still running

What does the "still running" mean at the end of the log entry?

• Did the server reboot?
• Is it going try later?
• Is it still rebooting, or is something else still running and it's waiting?

I've looked everywhere, but I can't find any reference to this.

Answer 1

From the man page

The pseudo user reboot logs in each time the system is rebooted. Thus last reboot will show a log of all the reboots since the log file was created.

The reboot user hasn't logged out since you've rebooted, this is normal.

Answer 2

It means that the OS has not been rebooted since Mon Nov 14.

last searches the file /var/log/wtmp to show who logged in and out. The user reboot logs run level changes (like reboot of the machine) which is shown by last -x. I found this from man reboot.

What OS are you running? On my Lubuntu 14.04 it does not show "still running" for reboot. This looks specific to OS implementation.

It does show "still logged in" for each of the terminal sessions my user account vagrant has open, which is what I expect to see.

vagrant@cordelia:~$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS \n \l

vagrant@cordelia:~$ last -x reboot | grep -i still
vagrant@cordelia:~$ last -x reboot 
reboot   system boot  3.13.0-77-generi Tue Sep 13 11:47 - 08:26 (63+21:39)  
reboot   system boot  3.13.0-77-generi Mon Sep 12 12:21 - 16:23  (04:02)    

wtmp begins Fri Sep  9 11:23:08 2016
vagrant@cordelia:~$ 


vagrant@cordelia:~$ last | grep -i still | head
vagrant  pts/4        :0               Wed Nov 16 08:22   still logged in   
vagrant  pts/18       :0               Wed Nov  2 10:25   still logged in   
vagrant  pts/17       :0               Wed Oct 19 10:23   still logged in   
vagrant  pts/16       :0               Fri Sep 16 09:36   still logged in   
vagrant  pts/15       :0               Fri Sep 16 09:30   still logged in   
vagrant  pts/13       :0               Fri Sep 16 09:22   still logged in   
vagrant  pts/12       :0               Wed Sep 14 14:52   still logged in   
vagrant  pts/10       :0               Wed Sep 14 14:35   still logged in   
vagrant  pts/9        :0               Wed Sep 14 14:34   still logged in   
vagrant  pts/5        :0               Tue Sep 13 15:28   still logged in   
vagrant@cordelia:~$