In the event that your system is running out of file descriptors, or you simply want to know what your users are doing, you can review their count of open files by running this command:
lsof | grep ' root ' | awk '{print $NF}' | sort | wc -l
Of course, if you want to drop the count and show the actual processes, you can run:
lsof | grep ' root '
lsof | grep ' root ' | awk '{print $NF}' | sort | wc -l
I am not sure what the awk,sort, and wc commands are being used for. Did you mean?
lsof | grep ' root ' | awk '{print $NF}' | sort -u | wc -l
Also of use would be:
lsof -u username
"I am not sure what the awk,sort, and wc commands are being used for."
Sorry, I meant more just using -c on great or counting the lines directly.