Get current users linux

whoami Command: Find the Current User in Linux

Find information about your current Linux user account

What to Know

• Type whoami to display the current username. If whoami isn’t installed, type id -un.
• More id commands: Show user ID without username = id -u. Show effective group -g. Show group name = id -gn.
• Show every group ID the user belongs to = id -G. Show every group name the user belongs = id -Gn.

This article explains how to use the whoami and id commands to find the user account you’re logged into, group IDs, and group names. Also included are instructions for using the —help switch and how to view the current version of whoami or id.

Use whoami to Display Your Username

To use the terminal window to display the user you’re actively logged in as, type the following command:

To quickly see how this works with another user account (if you haven’t made any other users in Linux), use the sudo command to log in as root:

Then, if you run the whoami command again, you’ll be told that you’re root.

How to Do It With id -un

In a strange circumstance where whoami isn’t installed, there is another command you can use to display your current username.

The result is exactly the same as the whoami command, so in this example, it would display jacob.

The id command can show more than the current user. It can also show the user id, group id, and groups to which the user belongs. For example, to show only the effective group the user belongs to, type the following:

The above command only shows the group id. It doesn’t show the group name. To show the effective group name, execute this command:

You can display every group id that a user belongs to by entering this:

The above command only shows the group ids. You can also use the Linux id command to display the group names:

If you want to display your user id without the username, run the following command:

More Information

You can use the —help switch with either whoami or id to find the current man page for each program.

To see the current version of id or whoami, use the following commands:

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UNIX / Linux List Current Logged In Users

H ow do I print the user names of users currently logged in to the current UNIX / Linux host / server from a command prompt?

You need to use any one of the following command line tools to list currently logged in users on Linux or Unix-like systems.

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	Yes
Requirements	w or who command on Linux and Unix
Est. reading time	5m

The following two file keep login records on Linux and Unix-like systems:

• /var/run/utmp – Keeps and allows us to discover information about who is currently using the system. Please note that there may be more L inux and Unix users currently using the system, because not all programs use utmp logging . In other words, poorly written app, hidden programs, malware, and other bad stuff will not be useful to list logged in users.
• /var/log/wtmp – Keeps records all logins and logouts.

We simply cannot read these files using cat command/grep command/egrep command as file is in binary database format. Hence, we use the following commands to find currently logged in users in Linux and Unix-like systems.

Linux Command To List Current Logged In Users

1. w command – Shows information about the users currently on the machine, and their processes.
2. who command – Display information about users who are currently logged in.
3. users command – See the login names of the users currently on the system, in sorted order, space separated, on a single line. It reads all information from /var/run/utmp file.

How to find currently logged in users in Linux

Open a terminal (or login into remote server using ssh command) and type the following commands.

Using w command to list current logged in users under Unix or Linux

Open the terminal application and then type the w command:
$ w

Fig.01: w command in action.

Understanding w command outputs

From Fig.01 we see the following for each user:

• USER – Linux or Unix login name.
• TTY – The tty name.
• FROM The remote host or IP address.
• @Login – Login time.
• IDEL – Idle time.
• JCPU – The JCPU time is the time used by all processes attached to the tty. However, it does not include past background jobs, but does include currently running background jobs.
• PCPU – The PCPU time is the time used by the current process, named in the “what” field.
• WHAT – The command line of that users current process.

To see info about a user named tom, enter:
$ w tom
Tell w command not print header:
$ w -h
$ w —no-header
We can also ignore current process username by passing the -u or —no-current to the w command:
$ w -u
$ w —no-current
Want to see remote hostname field? Try:
$ w -f
Show IP address instead of hostname for from field:
$ w -i
We can also old style output. In other words old outputs prints blank space for idle times less than one minute:
$ w -o

Display all logged in users using who command

The who command works on all Unix like operating systems such as macOS, *BSD, Linux and so on. The syntax is pretty simple:
# who
Here is what we see:

The who command displays the following information:

• root – The username
• pts/0 – Type of the terminal device. In this example, we see pseudoterminal pts/0 used by root user.
• 2013-03-12 15:10 – User login date and time stamp.
• (10.1.3.177) – The remote IP address from which the user logged into this server.

We can pass the -a option to who command as follows to see time of last system boot, display dead processes, system login processes, active processes spawned by init/systemd, print current runlevel, print last system clock change, show user’s message status, and list users logged in to Linux or Unix box:
# who -a
Here is output from older Linux system (pre Systemd):

Sample outputs from Systemd based Linux sysetem:

Getting help with the whois command

You can pass the following options to the who command (taken from the who command man page):

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users command

Open a terminal or login over the ssh session and enter the following users command:
$ users
Output who is currently logged:

Vieing logged in users with last command

Want to see a listing of last logged in users? Use the last command to lookup binary database called /var/log/wtmp and displays a list of all users logged in (and out) since that file was created. For instance see history for user named ‘vivek’:
$ last vivek

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Linux List All Users In The System Command

Table of contents

Linux list all users account using the /etc/passwd file

In order to list all users on Linux, use the cat command as follows:
$ cat /etc/passwd
Here is what I see:

Each line in the file has seven fields as follows. For example, consider the following line:
vnstat:x:131:137:vnstat daemon. /var/lib/vnstat:/usr/sbin/nologin
Where,

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• vnstat – The user name or login name.
• x – Encrypted password is stored in the /etc/shadow file.
• 131 – UID (user ID number)
• 137 – Primary GID (group ID number)
• vnstat daemon – GECOS. It may includes user’s full name (or application name, if the account is for a program), building and room number or contact person, office telephone number, home telephone number and any other contact information.
• /var/lib/vnstat – Home directory for the user.
• /usr/sbin/nologin – Login shell for the user. Pathnames of valid login shells comes from the /etc/shells file.

How to list users in Linux using pagers

Of course we can use pagers such as more/less commands as follows to view the /etc/passwd file:
$ more /etc/passwd
$ less /etc/passwd
Sample outputs:

Fig.01: List users using /etc/passwd

Linux list user names only

To list only usernames type the following awk command:
$ awk -F’:’ ‘< print $1>‘ /etc/passwd
Sample outputs:

Another option is to use the cut command:
$ cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd

Get a list of all users using the getent command

To get a list of all Linux users you can type the following getent command:
$ getent passwd
$ getent passwd | grep tom
## get a list all users ##
$ getent passwd | cut -d: -f1
## count all user accounts using the wc ##
$ getent passwd | wc -l
One can use the compgen command on Linux to list users and other resources too:
$ compgen -u

Find out whether a user account exists in the Linux server

We can use above commands to see whether a user exists in the Linux machine as follows using the grep command:

A simplified command would be:

How to count user accounts in the Linux server

Want to get user accounts count on your system? Try the wc command as follows:
$ compgen -u | wc -l
$ getent passwd | wc -l

A Note About System and General Users

Each user has numerical user ID called UID. It is defined in /etc/passwd file. The UID for each user is automatically selected using /etc/login.defs file when you use useradd command. To see current value, enter:
$ grep «^UID_MIN» /etc/login.defs
$ grep UID_MIN /etc/login.defs
Sample outputs:

1000 is minimum values for automatic uid selection in useradd command. In other words all normal system users must have UID >= 1000 and only those users are allowed to login into system if shell is bash/csh/tcsh/ksh etc as defined /etc/shells file. Type the following command to list all login users:

To see maximum values for automatic uid selection in the useradd command, enter:
$ grep «^UID_MAX» /etc/login.defs
Sample outputs:

In other words, all normal system users must have UID >= 1000 (MIN) and UID /etc/shells file. Here is an updated code to get details:

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How to show current logged in users in Linux

All user names are stored in /etc/passwd file and can be displayed with help of cat command or grep command/egrep command:
cat /etc/passwd
grep ‘^userNameHere’ /etc/passwd
grep ‘^tom’ /etc/passwd
Let us see all examples and usage in details.

How to show current logged in users in Linux

• The current time ( 22:11:17 )
• How long the Linux server has been running (18 days)
• How many users are currently logged on Linux (2 users)
• The system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes (1.01, 1.04, 1.05)

The following info displayed for each current logged in user:

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  • A podman tutorial for beginners – part I (run Linux containers without Docker and in daemonless mode)
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• sweta – Login name
• pts/10 – The tty name
• minitx – The remote host/desktop/laptop name
• 22:11 – Login time
• 5.00s – Idle time
• 0.04s – JCPU (it the time used by all processes attached to the tty. It does not include past background jobs, but does include currently running background jobs.)
• 0.02s – PCPU (it is the time used by the current process, named in the “what” field.)
• vim replicant.py – The command line of their current process

Find out who you are currently logged in as on Linux

Execute the following command:
whoami
Another option is to just type the following id command:
id

Use the whoami and id commands to find out who you are currently logged in as on Linux based system

Linux show who is logged on

Conclusion

This page showed how to find out current logged in users in Linux and what they are doing from the terminal. For more info see man pages using the man command:
man w
man who
man whoami

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Tutorial requirements
Requirements	Linux
Root privileges	No
Difficulty	Easy
Est. reading time	5 mintues