List All The Members Of A Group On Ubuntu

How do you get a list of all the members of a group on Ubuntu?

To do this, you can use the getent command, which stands for "get entries" and is used to get data from database like files on Linux systems.

Here's what the command looks like (replace name_of_group with your group name):

getent group name_of_group

This command will output something like this:

name_of_group:x:27:bob,bill

This command queries the /etc/group file in your system and gets each entry that matches name_of_group.

The output format is as follows:

group:password:GID:user(s)

Here's an explanation for each item:

• group is the name of the given group.
• password is the encrypted group password. If this value is empty, it means there is no password. If the value is x, the password is in the /etc/gshadow file.
• GID is the group ID.
• users() is a comma-separated list of users that are members of the group. An empty value means there are no users in the group.

If you want to get fancy, you can also output only the comma-delimited list of users without all the other stuff:

getent group name_of_group | awk -F: '{print $4}'

This will have an output that looks like this:

bob,bill

As you can see, this has a much cleaner output.

There you go! That's how you list out all the members of a certain group.

Thanks for reading and happy computing!