Check your Macs uptime and reboot history
Not to brag or anything, but I love the fact that that unless I’ve run Software Update I rarely have to reboot my Mac, this might not be that exciting to most Mac users but as a relatively recent Windows convert, I find this particularly nice. So naturally with my Mac geekiness I find it fun to check the uptime and reboot history of my Mac and others, it’s easy to do and it’s actually functionally useful too for troubleshooting certain Mac problems. Here’s how to do both via the Command Line:
How to Check your Macs uptime
To check your Macs uptime, simply type ‘uptime’ in the Terminal. In the below example, we have a Mac that has been up for 21 hours and 40 minutes.
YourMac:~ user$ uptime
10:33 up 21:40, 4 users, load averages: 0.09 0.19 0.21
How to Check your Macs reboot history
To check the reboot history of your Mac, type ‘last reboot’ in the Terminal. This will provide you with the dates and times of the last few reboots the machine has gone through.
YourMac:~user$ last reboot
reboot ~ Tue Sep 22 12:52
reboot ~ Sun Aug 30 23:17
reboot ~ Sat Aug 29 01:12
reboot ~ Fri Aug 28 22:07
wtmp begins Fri Aug 28 22:07
Nice huh?
“last reboot” doesn’t work for me for some reason (OS 10.5.8). I had to do “last | grep reboot”
[...] any updates or new apps recently, and my Mac hasn’t been rebooted in 9 days (you can check your Mac’s uptime with the terminal). It’s a bit of a mystery to me as to what caused it, but the above fix [...]
[...] you’re looking for a record of a Macs boot history, try using the “last reboot” command instead. Similarly if you’re only looking to [...]