HowTo list all users in system

ALInux · 11-06-2005, 04:53 AM

Hi guys ....I want to ask you if you have a command that allows me to list all users in the linux system Iam using....?

Ephracis · 11-06-2005, 05:00 AM

cat /etc/password shows you all existing users.
w shows you all active.

ALInux · 11-06-2005, 05:18 AM

Thank you for the help ... I will check it as soon as I get to my linux box

amer_58 · 11-06-2005, 02:21 PM

cat /etc/passwd | cut -d ":" -f1

pritchardtom · 11-06-2005, 03:30 PM

I think there is a "users" command as well that you can use if your using Linux on a network, such as a University server to see all who are currently connected.

man users for more information

ALInux · 11-07-2005, 02:26 AM

In /etc/passwd Ive got the following user....
The user name is ali
what is x?
what is 1001:1001
what do the 3 commas represent?
where is the group ?
where is the description ?

ali:x:1001:1001:,,,:/home/ali:/bin/bash

ALInux · 11-07-2005, 02:28 AM

And to amer_58 could you explain more how your command did what it did ?

kbflamelet · 11-07-2005, 03:28 AM

amer_58's command printed the first column of /etc/passwd to the screen. -f1 denotes the column; -d ":" denotes the seperator.

x is where the password goes, but the passwords are stored in a seperate file, /etc/shadow, to improve security.

1001:1001 is your user and group, respectively (correct me if I'm wrong).

I think ,,, is "full name", but I'm not too sure.

I hope this was helpful.

ALInux · 11-07-2005, 04:24 AM

That was surely helpfull but I need one more thing please

Lets say I want to extract a column that contains only the userid what should I add to the "cat" command ?

chrism01 · 11-08-2005, 12:24 AM

man cat, man cut or
cat /etc/passwd|cut -d':' -f3

ALInux · 11-08-2005, 04:29 AM

Thank you guys for the support ......... just one more question I read man cat and man cut...........but I wana know if there is a method to extract only the uid of one user.........( I want to know if it can be done this way) lets say how to extract the ID of user root using cat and cut ( I know that it is 0)

kbflamelet · 11-10-2005, 04:14 AM

This should do the trick for root: cat /etc/passwd | cut -d':' -f3 | head -n 1

If you want to do it for any user, then I'm afraid I can't help.

ALInux · 11-10-2005, 06:09 AM

I know how to do that.............. I want to display all users

chrism01 · 11-10-2005, 11:23 PM

My suggestion does list all user ids... what are you after exactly??
If you want to find the uid for a specific user, eg fred, specify the username like this:
cat /etc/passwd|grep fred|cut -d':' -f3

ALInux · 11-11-2005, 02:42 AM

What i mean is only those users that I created i.e. uid > 500

Actually, Chris you told me exactly what I wanted to know in the begining but now I do not want to display the users like root etc ........anymore