I need to run some calculations on a machine that I can only access remotely but also serves as a work station. There are many of them and I want to pick a "free" one. Free means in this case that no one is logged in locally.

My first try was the who command, but for some reason it only lists "selected" users and I can't really find out how they are selected. Next try: ps aux | cut -d " " -f1 | sort | uniq: better showing a bunch of demons but also the local user that was not displayed by who.

My current solution is to go in and do ps aux | grep "gnome-session" which is better but still gives me a lot of junk. Ideally I am looking for something that I can include in my ssh profile that warns me about (active) local users when I log in.