How can I list all user accounts in the terminal?

Question

How can I list all local user accounts in Terminal (whether logged in or not?) The commands users or who does not provide this information. OS X version is 10.6.8.

I have seen this suggested command - dscacheutil -q group

But it only lists domain user groups and non-local accounts.

As a long time AIX user, I sure miss the system management commands they baked into their unix. lsuser would be nice to have for this purpose. — bmike, Nov 01 '11 at 14:25

score 80 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 09 '13 at 13:06

80

How about

dscacheutil -q user | grep -A 3 -B 2 -e uid:\ 5'[0-9][0-9]'

edited Feb 09 '13 at 13:06

nohillside

100,768

answered Nov 01 '11 at 13:32

Kevin

4,142

I like this option. It returns a bunch of accounts beginning with an underscore, though. Any way to filter this out? e.g. _softwareupdate, _mysql – codecowboy Nov 01 '11 at 14:13
14

Pipe the result through grep dscl . list /Users | grep -v ^_.* – mmmmmm Nov 01 '11 at 14:20
Very cool! I'll have to remember this one. – daviesgeek Nov 09 '11 at 21:58
5

This is such an easy one to commit to memory, too. – Kelly Jul 26 '13 at 22:58
When I run this on Catalina, even with sudo, I only get myself. dscl . list /Users lists all users. – David Moles Nov 12 '20 at 17:55

score 59 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 06 '14 at 13:01

59

Try this one. I used it to find lost hidden account.

dscl . list /Users | grep -v '^_'

edited Oct 06 '14 at 13:01

Community

1

answered Feb 09 '13 at 12:29

user41486

591

4

That's precisely what @Mark said here. – Emil Feb 09 '13 at 12:36
what is the point of hidden accounts? – SuperUberDuper Jul 19 '16 at 13:09
To see uid as well, use dscl . list /Users UniqueID | grep -v '^_' – Marián Černý Aug 27 '17 at 11:10
What if the user isn't there? – Cameron Jan 13 '19 at 02:54

antekone · Answer 3 · 2022-11-03T11:04:32.677

12

User accounts since 10.6 are being managed by OpenDirectory. The backend files related to users for OpenDirectory are here:

/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users

Executing ls in this directory will enumerate all local users registered on the system. Executing plutil -p <file>.plist will allow you to read some properties for specified user account (i.e. current home directory path).

This is rather undocumented so I accept downvotes. However, this method can be used to inspect a system which is not running, and for which the user has only an offline disk image.

edited Nov 03 '22 at 11:04

answered Jan 26 '15 at 09:41

antekone

220

I like it, but it required sudo/root to work, std admin user got a permission error. dscl works for std admin. – JL Peyret May 12 '17 at 20:49
Thank you, I'm struggling to reset a password for a colleague and every guide/instruction online is showing the old method which no longer works... I was even questioning if the user was corrupt or just missing... however, this has shown the user is there. I've been searching for over an hour and this has got me a little closer but nearly every site in Google is showing outdated info. – wilhil Jan 27 '21 at 13:47
1

All that's in that directory are plist files. Using ls * is not necessary, ls on its own suffices. Since the directory is not accessible by users other than root , sudo ls /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/* will fail because the file globbing is done before the sudo command, while sudo ls /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users will succeed. – Elhem Enohpi Nov 02 '22 at 17:50
@ElhemEnohpi You're right, I've removed the * from the answer, as it indeed had no point :) – antekone Nov 03 '22 at 11:04
Even as root, Operation not permitted. – Devon Dec 17 '22 at 17:43
@Devon, works on my Ventura 13.1 with SIP enabled. – antekone Dec 19 '22 at 07:34

score 8 · Answer 4 · edited Mar 10 '16 at 01:04

8

dscacheutil returns more than just local users, for example any users I've queried Directory Services for also show.

I have found this more useful:

dscl . list /Users | grep -v "^_"

Although it also returns the likes of daemon, nobody and root.

edited Mar 10 '16 at 01:04

user3439894

58,676

answered Jun 19 '13 at 11:36

chymb

491

score 4 · Answer 5 · edited Feb 05 '17 at 15:36

4

JMTCW to recreate a command line friendly /etc/passwd equivalent (though not quite in the same order):

dscacheutil -q user |
    paste -d " "  - - - - - - - - |
    sed 's/^name: //;s/ [^[:space:]]*: /:/g'

Or if you prefer a space separated output (but parsing GECOS field will be a little more complicated:

dscacheutil -q user |
    cut -d: -f2 |\
    paste -d " "  - - - - - - - -

edited Feb 05 '17 at 15:36

nohillside

100,768

answered Feb 05 '17 at 12:13

don

41

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Nov 01 '11 at 13:36

2

If no user home directories were moved then ls /users will do. Except it will also list directories like 'Shared'.

answered Nov 01 '11 at 13:36

iskra

5,558

3

Never do this. There are much more than just Shared that can be there. – hamstergene Oct 25 '14 at 13:09

score -3 · Answer 7 · edited Aug 24 '16 at 07:06

You can also type:

who which tells you who's logged on, and where they're coming from. Useful if you're looking for someone who's actually physically in the same building as you, or in some other particular location.

w which tells you who's logged in, and what they're doing. Especially useful: the 'idle' part. This allows you to see whether they're actually sitting there typing away at their keyboards right at the moment.

How can I list all user accounts in the terminal?

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