- How to find out what group a given user has?
- How do I List All Groups in Linux
- Types of Groups in Linux
- Listing Users on Linux
- Listing Users Using the /etc/passwd File
- Listing Usernames Using awk
- Listing Usernames Using getent
- Listing the Connected Users on Your Linux Host
- Listing Groups Using /etc/group File
- Listing Groups Using getent
- Listing Groups for the Current User
- Conclusion
- About the author
- Simran Kaur
- List All Groups in Linux
- 1. Overview
- 2. Reading the /etc/group File
- 3. Using the getent Command
- 4. Getting Groups of a Specific User
- 5. Conclusion
- How to Run ‘groups’ command in Linux
- Syntax:
- How to use the “group” command:
- Conclusion:
- About the author
- Aqsa Maqbool
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
How do I List All Groups in Linux
Linux systems may have several users that are divided into many groups. These groups are the collection of users with the same set of privileges like reading, writing, or executing permission for a particular file or resources shared among the users of that group. Linux allows you to add a new user or the existing user to the existing group for utilizing the privileges of that particular group that it will grant. We will learn about the various Linux groups and how to list all the members of the group.
Types of Groups in Linux
Linux has two types of groups that contain several users:
- Primary or Login Group: it is the group associated with the files created by a specific user. The name for that primary group has the same name as the user’s name that will create that specific file. Each user must belong to exactly a single group.
- Secondary or Supplementary Group: you can use this type of group to grant privileges to a set of users that belong to that group. A user can be assigned to no or more secondary groups.
Listing Users on Linux
For listing all the users present on the Linux system, you can run the cat command on the ‘/etc/passwd” file. This command will help in returning the number of users that are present on the Linux system.
Also, use the “less” or “more” command for navigating within the user’s list.
Listing Users Using the /etc/passwd File
For listing the usernames on the Linux system, you can use the “cat” command and then pipe the output to the “cut” command to isolate the usernames available in the first column in the list. Run the below-mentioned command as shown below.
Listing Usernames Using awk
For listing the usernames on the Linux system, use the “cat” command and then pipe the output to the “awk” command that works similar to the “cat” command.
Here we are using the “awk” interpreter, as shown below.
Listing Usernames Using getent
Use the getent command along with the “passwd” argument for listing the usernames available on Linux. Also, you can mention the optional user that you want to be displayed on the screen.
The getent command retrieves the entries from the Name Service Switch databases. It is a Unix utility for retrieving entries from various data sources. Check the list of the data sources available from the nsswitch.conf, which is stored at /etc.
If you want to list all the users with the help of the getent function, you can run the following command.
Listing the Connected Users on Your Linux Host
To get the list of the users connected to the Linux system, you can use the following command.
Using this command, you will provide the connected users’ list and the shell they are using.
Also, you can use the “users” command to get the same result as the “who” command, as shown below.
Listing Groups Using /etc/group File
Use the most commonly used “cat” command to get the list of the groups available in the “/etc/group” file. When you run the command, you will get the list of the groups.
But if you are looking for the group names that are present in the “/etc/group” file, use the cat command and then pipe the output to the “cut” command as shown below.
Also, if you want to isolate one group to check what users belong to that group, use the below command.
Listing Groups Using getent
You can use the “getent” command for listing the users on the Linux system.
If you do not provide the key, you will get the entire group file.
Listing Groups for the Current User
Using the “group” command will display a list of groups a specific user is in.
If you do not provide any argument, you will get the list of the groups for the user that runs the command.
Conclusion
The Linux system contains users and groups in different files. Sometimes it becomes important to get the user details and to which group they belong. Thus Linux offers some commands that will help you to achieve that. You can run some commands to get the user details and the group to which they belong. You can also get the complete list of users on the Linux system, active users, and groups names.
You can go through this article to get various commands for getting the list of all the groups in Linux and understand how they work.
About the author
Simran Kaur
Simran works as a technical writer. The graduate in MS Computer Science from the well known CS hub, aka Silicon Valley, is also an editor of the website. She enjoys writing about any tech topic, including programming, algorithms, cloud, data science, and AI. Travelling, sketching, and gardening are the hobbies that interest her.
List All Groups in Linux
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1. Overview
Users and groups are two important elements in Linux security management. In this quick tutorial, we’re going to look at how to list all groups on the current system.
Additionally, we’ll address how to get all groups a specific user belongs to as well.
2. Reading the /etc/group File
In Linux, all groups are defined in the file /etc/group. Moreover, it stores each group entry in the format:
group_name:password(encrypted):GID:user_list
First, let’s take a look at an example of /etc/group:
$ cat /etc/group root:x:0:root bin:x:1:root,bin,daemon daemon:x:2:root,bin,daemon sys:x:3:root,bin adm:x:4:root,daemon tty:x:5: disk:x:6:root lp:x:7:cups,daemon,kent mem:x:8: .
The /etc/group file is a plain text file. Therefore, we can read the file and use our Linux command-line fu to extract the data we want, such as the group name:
$ cut -d: -f1 /etc/group root bin daemon sys adm tty disk lp mem .
In the example above, we’ve used the cut command to extract the group name only. Thus, the output contains all group names on the system, one group per line.
3. Using the getent Command
The /etc/group file defines all groups on the local system.
However, if we’re working on a networked system, the system reads local groups from the /etc/group file, and it can read groups from networked services as well, such as LDAP.
We can use the getent command to read the group database to get all groups:
$ getent group root:x:0:root bin:x:1:root,bin,daemon daemon:x:2:root,bin,daemon sys:x:3:root,bin adm:x:4:root,daemon tty:x:5: disk:x:6:root lp:x:7:cups,daemon,kent mem:x:8: .
As the output shows, each group’s format has the same format as the /etc/group file.
If we want to obtain the group names only, the same cut trick can help us here as well:
$ getent group | cut -d: -f1 root bin daemon sys adm tty disk lp mem .
4. Getting Groups of a Specific User
We’ve learned how to get all groups defined on a system. Sometimes, in more common cases, we want to know which groups a specific user belongs to.
In this section, we’re going to show two ways to get this information. Both are pretty straightforward.
The first way to reach our goal is to use the groups command. This command is shipped with the shadow-utils package. Therefore, it’s available on all Linux distros by default.
If we don’t give it any arguments, the groups command will list all groups of the current user:
kent$ groups lp wheel dbus network video audio optical storage input users vboxusers docker kent
However, if we like, we can pass a username to the command, and it’ll report only the groups that the given user belongs to:
kent$ groups root root bin daemon sys adm disk wheel log
Alternatively, we can use the id command to do it, too.
The id command is a handy utility to report user information, such as the username, the real name, and groups.
Since the id command is a member of the Coreutils, it has been installed on all Linux distros by default.
We can combine the -G and -n options to make the id command print all group names of a given user.
Similar to the groups command, if we don’t tell id a username, it’ll print group names of the current user:
kent$ id -Gn kent lp wheel dbus network video audio optical storage input users vboxusers docker
However, when we pass a username to the command, it’ll naturally output the group names of the given user:
kent$ id -Gn root root bin daemon sys adm disk wheel log
5. Conclusion
In this quick article, we’ve first learned two approaches to get all groups defined on the system:
Later, we’ve also addressed two straightforward commands – id and groups – to get a specific user’s group names through examples.
How to Run ‘groups’ command in Linux
In Linux, there is user and groups; users use the system, and groups are logical frameworks for managing a set of users. Users can be categorized into various groups, while groups are a set of multiple users.
It isn’t easy to manage the privileges such as security and permission rights among different users. Group command makes it easy to manage them at a group level.
Give the username as input; it will return the member’s name of primary and secondary groups. If no names are specified, it will print the currently running user information.
Syntax:
Syntax of “group” command would be like this:
How to use the “group” command:
Open the terminal, type “groups” to print the list of all groups that are currently logged in:
Adding username as input:
Provide the username as an argument to get a list of all groups from which a particular user belongs, a username of my Linux device is “aqsa”:
Getting User id:
Use the “id” command to display the information about a user and its groups. The command will show the primary and secondary groups; primary shows the user and group id while secondary shows the username:
Displaying usernames:
Use a combination of “-n” and “G” options to print usernames of all groups instead of user ids:
Displaying group details:
Two ways to display the group’s details:
Use the below-mentioned command to get the list of all Linux groups:
The “getent” command shows entries from specified databases, which can be used to get a list of all groups:
To get the information of any particular group, pass “username” as an argument:
If no output comes, it means the group does not exist.
Getting help information:
To print help information, type the “–help” command in a terminal. It gives a brief description and the related links of the “groups” command.
Checking the version:
To check the version of the “groups” command in Linux, use the “version” command:
Conclusion:
A “group” in Linux is a collection of users. The “groups” command lists all the groups and their details in the terminal. Groups make it simple to handle users who have similar security and access rights. We can also use the “/etc/group” and “getent” commands to display a list of groups. We have learned what the “groups” command is and the functionality of its different options.
About the author
Aqsa Maqbool
As a Software engineer, I am passionate to write about various IT related
articles but have deep interest in Linux. I spend most of my time reading Linux related blogs and IT related books. I want to serve the world with my writing skills.