This post explains how to check what users are in Linux. One can easily check user details in Linux System to know how many users are created in the System.
Check user details in Linux
You can check user details in Linux using who command. ‘who’ prints information about users who are currently logged on. If you want to see who is currently logged in, use who command.
When no command option is given, ‘who’ prints the following information for each user currently logged on:
- login name
- terminal line
- login time
- remote hostname or X display
How to use who command?
You can use the following who commands to get the list of users on your system: who | wc -l who | cut -d “” -f 1 who | cut -d “” -f 1 | sort -u
Here the ‘cut’ command is used to write to standard output selected parts of each line of each
input file, or standard input if no files are given or for a file name of ‘-’.
In simple words you can use the cut command to exclude all information except for the user name.
If you want to sort the names alphabetically, you can use the following command (also listed above): who | cut -d “” -f 1 | sort -u
And if you wish to count the number of unique users, add wc -l at the end of the command as shown below: who | cut -d “” -f 1 | sort -u | wc -l
If you want to get a list of regular human users only, you can use the getnet passwd command using the following command arguments:
getent passwd | awk -F: '$3 >= 1000 && $3 <= 60000 {count++} END {print count}'Similarly, if you want to see the actual names of the regular users alongside the count, you can use the lslogins tool using the following command:
lslogins -uGet a List of All Users
If you want to get a list of all users you can use the command /etc/passwd file. Note that when you get the result, each line represents login information for one user.