Linux: How to List All Users

To list all users on Linux, the best general-purpose command is getent passwd. If you only want usernames, run getent passwd | cut -d: -f1. This is usually more complete than reading /etc/passwd directly because getent follows the system's Name Service Switch (NSS) configuration, so it can include accounts supplied by services such as LDAP or other configured identity sources.

List all users with getent

Open a terminal and run:

getent passwd

Each line is a user record. To show only the login names, use:

getent passwd | cut -d: -f1

You can also inspect one known account without scrolling through the full list:

getent passwd alice

The GNU C Library documentation explains that NSS controls how system databases such as passwd are resolved through /etc/nsswitch.conf. See the GNU C Library NSS documentation.

List local users from /etc/passwd

If you specifically want accounts stored in the local password database, read /etc/passwd. The file contains one colon-separated record per local account. A typical record includes the username, password placeholder, UID, primary GID, comment field, home directory, and login shell.

For usernames only:

cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd

The same result can be produced with awk:

awk -F: '{print $1}' /etc/passwd

This list normally includes both human users and service accounts such as root, daemon, or accounts created by installed software.

View complete local account records

To inspect the complete local file, use less so you can scroll comfortably:

less /etc/passwd

You can also print the file directly:

cat /etc/passwd

On modern Linux systems, the password field commonly contains x. That does not mean the password is stored as plain text in /etc/passwd; password hashes are normally kept separately in /etc/shadow, which has more restrictive permissions. The Linux man-pages project documents the seven fields and this shadow-password behavior in passwd(5).

List usernames with Bash compgen

If you are using Bash, compgen can generate username completion candidates:

compgen -u

For a long result, page through it with:

compgen -u | less

Or remove duplicate names and sort the output:

compgen -u | sort -u

compgen is a Bash builtin, so it is less universal than getent for scripts that must work across different shells. The GNU Bash manual documents compgen as part of Bash's programmable completion facilities.

How to show regular users instead of service accounts

There is no single UID cutoff that is correct for every Linux distribution or organization. Many systems reserve lower UIDs for system accounts and assign regular users from a configured minimum, but that policy can vary. If your system uses /etc/login.defs, you can check its configured minimum with:

grep '^UID_MIN' /etc/login.defs

You can also look for accounts with interactive shells as a practical clue:

getent passwd | awk -F: '$7 !~ /(nologin|false)$/ {print $1}'

This is only a heuristic: an account can have an interactive shell without being a normal desktop user, and externally managed users may follow different UID policies.

Save, count, or search the user list

Once you have the list you need, standard shell tools make it easy to reuse:

• Save usernames: getent passwd | cut -d: -f1 > ~/linux-users.txt
• Count returned accounts: getent passwd | cut -d: -f1 | wc -l
• Find one account: getent passwd username

Which method should you use?

For most administrators and desktop users, start with getent passwd | cut -d: -f1. Use /etc/passwd when you intentionally need only local accounts.