> That is the actual time in seconds since the epoch (unix time) that the > machine was started. It's stored in /proc/stat, and vmstat just grabs the > raw value and displays it with a slightly better label (it's btime in > /proc/stat). Matthew is right. On Linux, `who -b' shows the time the system came up: $ who -b system boot 2009-10-19 16:53 You can use this to verify (month starts with 0): $ perl -e 'use Time::Local; print timelocal(0, 53, 16, 19, 9, 2009)' 1255989180$ $ $ vmstat -s | grep boot 1255989111 boot time I got 69 seconds' difference mostly because (I think) /var/run/utmp has a slightly different bootup time than /proc/stat. That is, /proc/stat is populated earlier than /var/run/utmp. The difference would be larger if I assumed a non-zero second in my Perl one-liner for the time given by `who -b'. Yong Huang -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l