can anyone tell a command to list all the users of a system...........................
to be specific, not the users that are currently logged in, i want a command that lists all the users which have been created(including that ones created by softwares or OS itself) and i do know that it can be found by /etc/passwd...but i want a command.............

PLZ HELP>>>

Use this

[root@host root]# lastlog

Thanks,
Rinish (rinishriju)

On my system, lastlog doesn't list all users, but only a subset.

Why do you want a command? What's wrong with
Groetjes,

Kees-Jan

cat /etc/passwd doesnt list your ldap users (ie: users at your domain controler) --> kees-jan

/ Rinish (rinishriju)

If your system is configured to use winbind to authenticate against AD controllers, then the following commands can be useful:

wbinfo -u
wbinfo -g

-or-

getent passwd
getent group

If you have applications specifically using LDAP, then the only command I'm aware of is "ldapsearch"

thaks rinish for ur help

So how do you see list of users.....
Any guesses..
(I'll tell you & make it short & simple...)
As we all know the user list reside in /etc/passwd, so we can view the registered user by looking up at this file.
But now the fuss is that it also contains many other fields & machine trust accounts & inbuilt accounts.

So now we'll make a command of our own..

We'll start by
1.cat /etc/passwd

2.As we all know that by default all the users created will have their home directories in /home share
so we'll modify our command a bit by using grep.
Now it'll be
cat /etc/passwd | grep "/home"

3. Now we'll get all the user accounts which have their home share in /home.
But the only output we need is the list of users & nothing else.

4. So we'll modify our command again
cat /etc/passwd | grep "/home" |cut -d: -f1
Now what we have done is that we have piped the output of previous command to another variable "cut"
What we have done here is we have added
cut -d: -f1
-d: means delimite :
-f1 means display first field of line i.e. username.

So final command is
Cat /etc/passwd |grep "/home" |cut -d: -f1

This works until all your users have their home share in /home. If you have defined their home share to some other destination. Modify the above command.


(Hint : In previous case we started grep "/home" , this time we'll use grep "/bin/bash" or whtever valid shell you are using)

Now command will be like..
Cat /etc/passwd |grep "/bin/bash" |cut -d: f1

But this will also result some inbuilt user account.
To avoid that.. we'll now pipe the output to another variable… as we know that UID starts from 500 & above..
So our new command would be:

Cat /etc/passwd |grep "/bin/bash" |grep "[5-9][0-9][0-9]" |cut -d: -f1

----------------
Now as we are finished with desired results… its time to create an ALIAS for the above commands

Alias userlist='cat /etc/passwd |grep "/bin/bash" |grep "[5-9][0-9][0-9]" |cut -d: -f1'

Its all done.
----------------

Type userlist at your prompt & you'll get the list of users.

If you have a very large nos of users like at lalbaug & qutab centers, then you can further pipe the output of userlist command.

Userlist |grep "admin"
It will only list usernames with admin in it.
(can be modified to fit your needs)

This command is not going to help you if you are using SSO or even an ldap/nis authentication. because centralised users will not show up at /etc/passwd file.

/ Rinish (rinishriju)

I am taking the case we are using /etc/passwd.
In case of LDAP/NIS... this procedure is not going to work.

is there any other command that lists all the nis/ldap users?

/ Rinish (rinishriju)