[CentOS] finding out the time of the second-to-last reboot

Mon Aug 9 20:52:13 UTC 2010
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>

On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Boris Epstein wrote:

> Hello all,

> I've got a CentOS box that became non-responsive today for some 
> obscure reason and had to be rebooted. Is there a way to find out 
> when it last had to be rebooted before today? uptime gives you no 
> history past the very last reboot, so obviously I need to find some 
> other way to get an answer to my question.

The last utility will do it:

   # simple, but needs eye-parsing
   last reboot

   # exact, but fragile if wtmp isn't old enough
   last reboot | head -n2 | tail -n1

but only if /var/log/wtmp is old enough. If your system rotates wtmp, 
then you'll have to spelunk /var/log/messages*.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/