listing users on a server

[hurleyint1386]

Hi, I was wondering if there was any way to list the users with an account on a server? I have an account on a UNIX server at my college, and I was wondering if I could get a list of account names on the command line so that I don't have to ask a bunch of teachers what their user name is to send them messages or anything. Thanks a lot

[Icarus]

'finger' is a great app for that, if it's installed.

/etc/passwd will also have the users

[hurleyint1386]

when i try the /etc/passwd it tells me permission denied. im only a local user, i dont have access to root. im still new to the unix environment, so i dont know lots about the command line. any other suggestions?

[serz]

Most of the users have home directories, they're usually in /home. You may want to try to list its contents.

[matrixonline]

As most of the users home directory are placed in the /home, you can simply count the directories to get a number, provided you have read permission on the /home.

Fire in

ls -l /home | wc -l

it will give you a number close to the actual user count.

[Suramya]

Try using

cat /etc/passwd

to output the password file. All users usually have read access to this file so the above command should work.

Or you could use finger.

Hope this helps.

- Suramya

[bwkaz]

Or, if you want just the usernames (not the home directories, shells, extended info, etc.), you can do it with cut:

cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd

The -d: argument tells cut to use the : character as its delimiter, and the -f1 argument tells cut to print only the first field. (Fields are delimited by the delimiter, just in case that's not obvious from the name. )

Also note that not everything in /etc/passwd is necessarily a human user, either. A lot of daemons use a special restricted user to run as -- openssh, Apache, and BIND can all be configured to do that. So you might have to do some manual or semi-manual filtering on this list, but it should get you close.