How can I display all users and groups with a command?

Question

I want to display:

1. All users and

2. All groups

   in my system using command-line.

users and groups commands display users currently logged in, and groups a user belongs to respectively.

How to display a list of all users and all groups by command-line?

Solution 1

You can display with the help of compgen builtin command as follows:

1. To display all users run following command:

   compgen -u
   

2. To display all groups run following command:

   compgen -g
   

However you can also display all users by cut -d ":" -f 1 /etc/passwd.

Solution 2

Here we are going to use getent for the detailed the info

We can list the user with the following command:

getent passwd

We can list the group as follows:

getent group

To fetch detail a specific user

getent passwd lalit

Replace the lalit with your user name. Lalit will not be in every system :)

You can read the more into about getent here

Comments

[steeldriver]

Nice! it might be preferable to use getent passwd / getent group instead of cat'ing the local files (getent should work for non-local accounts as well)

[muru]

@steeldriver compgen does seem to work for non-local accounts (at least for LDAP).

[steeldriver]

@muru I was referring to the second method specifically (cat /etc/passwd | cut -d ...)

[muru]

@steeldriver Ah, sorry. I thought that was a more general observation.

[Marinos An]

Well, on my ubuntu, I have some files created by docker mount with 999:999 as user:group, but unfortunately none of the above commands prints them.