Comments on: Viewing all users on a Linux system

By: Hire Skip

Hire Skip — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:26:11 +0000

Excellent. I’ve been struggling with this so a big help. Thanks.

By: Samuel Huckins

Samuel Huckins — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:46:25 +0000

@Jason Thanks for the improvements! I’ve adjusted the function in the post accordingly, much more elegant.

I’ve tried to purge the desire to needlessly cat things, but it has been stubborn

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:41:12 +0000

Nice idea. You can remove the cat, and grep pipes with awk by using something similar to:

awk -F”:” ‘!/bin\/false/{ print “username: ” $1 “, uid: ” $3 “, homedir: ” $6 }’ /etc/passwd

By: Samuel Huckins

Samuel Huckins — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:18:32 +0000

@slinger LDAP and NIS already have tools to list their users readily though. Optimally, I’ll re-write this function to pull all the possible sources with getent and parse them the same.

By: slinger

slinger — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:25:55 +0000

/etc/passwd will only list the local users. What about LDAP or NIS users? The getent command is the only way to do that.

By: Samuel Huckins

Samuel Huckins — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:04:29 +0000

@Niall I hadn’t seen that command actually, very cool. Doesn’t solve the problem though. This just provides easy access to all the locations users can be specified. You still need a utility to wrap these, parsing out their entries and displaying one unified view.

Version 2.0 of my function I suppose

By: Niall

Niall — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 21:40:20 +0000

/etc/passwd isn’t the only place to define users. getent(1) is probably a far safer/reliable mechanism for getting users.