How can I display all users and groups with a command?
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?
2 Answers 2
You can display with the help of compgen builtin command as follows:
- To display all users run following command:
However you can also display all users by cut -d «:» -f 1 /etc/passwd .
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)
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.
Here we are going to use getent for the detailed the info
We can list the user with the following command:
We can list the group as follows:
To fetch detail a specific user
Replace the lalit with your user name. Lalit will not be in every system 🙂
You can read the more into about getent here
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How to List User Groups on Ubuntu Linux with examples
This brief tutorial shows students and new users how to list groups on Ubuntu 18.04 | 16.04 Linux systems.
If you’re a student or new user looking for a Linux system to start learning on, the most accessible place to start is on Ubuntu Linux OS. It’s a great Linux operating system for beginners.
Ubuntu is an open-source Linux operating system that runs on desktops, laptops, servers, and other devices.
Ubuntu and Windows systems allow you to be productive, easy to use, and reliable and enable you to install and run thousands of programs from gaming to productivity suite software for individuals and businesses.
This post shows you how to perform the primary task of listing groups on Ubuntu Linux.
Linux Groups:
There are two types of groups users can be assigned to. One is a primary, and the other is a second group that grants privileges to users to access specific resources.
Below is how a typical Linux user account is added and assigned group memberships:
User — A user with an account must belong to one primary group. The user’s primary group is typically named after the user account name.
Primary Group — The primary group is created simultaneously when the user account is created, and the user is automatically added to it. The file created by the user automatically belongs to the user group.
Secondary Group — This group is not required and is only there to give users access to other resources they don’t already have access to. Users can belong to one or as many secondary groups are possible.
The primary user’s group is stored in the /etc/passwd file, and the supplementary groups, if any, are listed in the /etc/group file.
List User Groups using the group’s command
Now that you know the types of groups for users, you can use the groups command to find the groups a user belongs to. Running the groups command without arguments will list all the groups the user belongs to.
Should output all the groups the account richard belongs to. The primary group is the first group with the same name as the user account name.
Ouput: richard adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare
To list all the groups a user belongs, add the username to the group’s command
This should output the same as above
Output richard : richard adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare
List User Groups using the id command
One can also use the id command to list group information about the specified user. It prints user and group information for the specified USER,
The command will show the username (uid), the user’s primary group (gid), and the user’s secondary groups (groups)
Should output the line below:
Output: uid=1000(richard) gid=1000(richard) groups=1000(richard),4(adm),24(cdrom),27(sudo),30(dip),46(plugdev),116(lpadmin),126(sambashare)
List Group Membership using the getent command
If you want to know a particular group’s members, use the getent command. This command gets entries from the administrative database.
To get a membership of the cdrom group, run the command below
This should output all the users who have access to the cdrom group.
Listing All Groups
To list the entire groups on Ubuntu, run the command below
That should output all the groups on each line
root:x:0: daemon:x:1: bin:x:2: sys:x:3: adm:x:4:syslog,richard tty:x:5: disk:x:6: lp:x:7: mail:x:8: news:x:9: uucp:x:10: man:x:12: proxy:x:13: kmem:x:15: dialout:x:20: fax:x:21: voice:x:22: cdrom:x:24:richard floppy:x:25: tape:x:26: sudo:x:27:richard audio:x:29:pulse dip:x:30:richard .
Congratulations! You have learned how to list groups on Ubuntu Linux.
Richard W
I love computers; maybe way too much. What I learned I try to share at geekrewind.com.
How to find out what group a given user has?
This appears to be pretty useful as well. It has more verbose output than the ‘groups’ command, so if you need the group id/user id use this!
On Linux/OS X/Unix to display the groups to which you (or the optionally specified user) belong, use:
which is equivalent to groups [user] utility which has been obsoleted on Unix.
On OS X/Unix, the command id -p [user] is suggested for normal interactive.
Explanation on the parameters:
-G , —groups — print all group IDs
-n , —name — print a name instead of a number, for -ugG
-p — Make the output human-readable.
or just study /etc/groups (ok this does probably not work if it uses pam with ldap)
Below is the script which is integrated into ansible and generating dashboard in CSV format.
sh collection.sh #!/bin/bash HOSTNAME=`hostname -s` for i in `cat /etc/passwd| grep -vE "nologin|shutd|hal|sync|root|false"|awk -F':' '' | sed 's/[[:space:]]/,/g'`; do groups $i; done|sed s/\:/\,/g|tr -d ' '|sed -e "s/^/$HOSTNAME,/"> /tmp/"$HOSTNAME"_inventory.txt sudo cat /etc/sudoers| grep -v "^#"|awk ''|grep -v Defaults|sed '/^$/d;s/[[:blank:]]//g'>/tmp/"$HOSTNAME"_sudo.txt paste -d , /tmp/"$HOSTNAME"_inventory.txt /tmp/"$HOSTNAME"_sudo.txt|sed 's/,[[:blank:]]*$//g' >/tmp/"$HOSTNAME"_inventory_users.txt My output stored in below text files.
cat /tmp/ANSIBLENODE_sudo.txt cat /tmp/ANSIBLENODE_inventory.txt cat /tmp/ANSIBLENODE_inventory_users.txt