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

Question

I want to display:

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?

score 320 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 08 '16 at 18:31

320

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

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

edited Jun 08 '16 at 18:31

wjandrea

answered Aug 23 '14 at 14:26

Pandya

20

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) – steeldriver Aug 23 '14 at 14:31
1

@steeldriver compgen does seem to work for non-local accounts (at least for LDAP). – muru Aug 23 '14 at 14:32
2

@muru I was referring to the second method specifically (cat /etc/passwd | cut -d ...) – steeldriver Aug 23 '14 at 14:46
1

@steeldriver Ah, sorry. I thought that was a more general observation. – muru Aug 23 '14 at 14:57
1

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. – Marinos An Mar 19 '19 at 11:31
5

For who might be interested, compgen is for "completion generation", to generate and display possible completions depending on the options. It can be used to complete many things, like filenames if using -f or -f my-fi. The -u is for completing usernames, and if you leave it blank, it displays all of them. – KeitelDOG Apr 21 '24 at 17:49

score 40 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 10 '19 at 13:19

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

2 Answers2