Linux check exist user

UNIX / Linux Command To Check Existing Groups and Users

H ow do I check the existing Linux / UNIX users and groups under Linux operating system?

You can easily check the existing users and groups under a Linux or Unix-like systems such as HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, Apple macOS/OS X and more using the following commands:

Tutorial details
Difficulty level	Easy
Root privileges	No
Requirements	Linux or Unix terminal
Est. reading time	3 minutes

1. getent command : Fetch details for a particular user or group from a number of important text files called databases on a Linux or Unix-like systems. This is portable and recommended way to get information on users and groups.
2. Directly query /etc/passwd for user names or /etc/group file for group names using the grep command/egrep command, and awk command.

Let us see how to check for existing groups and users on Linux and Unix-like systems using command-line.

Method #1: getent command to lookup username and group name

The syntax is as follows to find out if user named foo exists in system:

The syntax is as follows to find out if group named bar exists in system:

Sample demo of all commands:

Fig.01: getent and friends demo on a Linux or Unix system to find out user and group names

Method #2: Find out if user exists in /etc/passwd file

The /etc/passwd file stores essential information required during login. All you have to do is search this file for user name using the following syntax using grep command grep username /etc/passwd
OR we can use the egrep command too:
egrep -i «^ username » /etc/passwd
# search for multiple users
egrep -i «^ username1|username2 » /etc/passwd
For example, find out if vivek user exists or not, enter:
$ egrep -i «^vivek» /etc/passwd
OR
$ egrep -i «^vivek:» /etc/passwd
Sample outputs:

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A quick shell script code:

Normally, exit status is 0 returned if user accounts (lines) are found and 1 otherwise.

Use awk command to search user name

The syntax is as follows to search user named ‘apache’

Find out if group exists in /etc/group file

The /etc/group is an text file which defines the groups to which users belong under Linux and UNIX operating system. Again, you have to search /etc/group file using following syntax:
$ egrep -i «^ groupname » /etc/group
For, example find out if vivek group exists or not, enter:
$ egrep -i «^vivek» /etc/group
# look for vivek or sudo group in /etc/group
$ egrep -i «^(vivek|sudo)» /etc/group

Say hello to id command

The id command is another option to display user / group information for any USERNAME, or the current user. To find out more about user called, tom, enter:
$ id tom
Sample outputs:

id command exit status is 0 returned if user accounts (lines) are found and 1 otherwise. A sample shell script using id command:

How to list all users under Linux or Unix

Try the following syntax:
more /etc/passwd
more /etc/group

Summing up

We explained various Linux and Unix commands that one can use to search for existing users and group in /etc/passwd and /etc/group files, respectively. Make sure you check out the following man pages using the man command:

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Comments on this entry are closed.

don’t forget the “:” after the username otherwise you could end up with this scenario:

$ egrep -i “^vivek” /etc/passwd
vivek:x:1000:1000:Vivek Gite. /home/vivek:/bin/bash
viveks:x:1001:1001:Vivek Smith. /home/viveks:/bin/bash

I really wish the author would update the article to include that because you know 7 years later and still no fix? Worse yet, it’s the first Google search result for “linux check if group exists”.

If you are using NIS do the following:

ypcat passwd | grep vivek

The ‘id’ command should be demonstrated first in this tutorial, as systems using LDAP (other or remote authentication services) will not have users in the local files.

Also why the uses of egrep when a simple grep will do. Keep it simple for the beginners your aiming at.

You should look at getent rather than grepping the local files. “getent passwd” or “getent group” will provide a unified view of users or groups available, respecting your NSS (Name Service Switch) configuration (which is important when you have additional users or groups via LDAP or NIS).

hey Vivek, that was cool..

many of us surely wont care if its grep or egrep ( or fgrep) as long as it does the job and we are taught these wonderful tricks..

Can you please tell me a command to list all of existing user ?

U can try
egrep “*” /etc/passwd
or
egrep “?” /etc/passwd

Very nice site, I could get, what i want in seconds rather than in minutes

`id` comand does not check if groups exist.
`man id`

Print user and group information for the specified USERNAME

the -g flag prints out the primary group id for the user

have you find any solution for that?

Hello
Linux Gurus,
Is there a Command to find out user creation date ?

or any other possible ways to find the same.

please help me
Its urgent.

Thanks In Advance

please tell everyone you ask.
no way to list the user is not disabled in linux.
and has been in how long dis.

The grep approaches are all wrong. You are assuming that an user won’t pick a name that is a started substring of an existing group. Even worse, if you choose to limit the ‘username’ string you could match a group instead of a user. You will mistakenly get output from the script thinking that the user ‘apache’ (or whatever) exists…

You can’t play with strings without semantics. You need a tool that in fact *knows* that what you are talking about is indeed a user.

The best approach for not playing with strings semantics is the id command:

NAME
id – print real and effective user and group IDs

As davidhi mentioned
Using getent is a much better solution in my opinion

# search for user named ‘vivek’
getent passwd vivek

#search for group named ‘vivek’
getent group vivek

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Thread: Checking if users exist

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Checking if users exist

hi guys.
Not sure if this is the right place fo this but.

I’m just learning to write bash scripts. I’m experimenting on a ubuntu server 11.04 virtual machine.

As part of the script I want to automate user creation.

Is there a way to check if a user already exists in a script. so i can do something like

Re: Checking if users exist

There’s no simple command to do that (at least that I know). You have to search the /etc/passwd file. This is part of a working code that I have used in the past:

Re: Checking if users exist

Don’t depend on /etc/passwd. nsswitch.conf is capable of using multiple databases. You should use «getent passwd» in Linux to query this information.

This was not tested but here is the idea:

Re: Checking if users exist

Thanks, good to know. BTW, I took the liberty of making some corrections to your script. This works on my system:

Last edited by papibe; June 29th, 2011 at 03:01 AM . Reason: spelling

Re: Checking if users exist

That is good to know. I’ve always used /etc/passwd for this. Thank you for sharing

Re: Checking if users exist

Well thanks for thats guys.
I will test that on my system shortly

Re: Checking if users exist

Hi guys just thought I’d post my results for you

Heres what I finally went with

I’m sure this is a fairly common use. I’ve simply set it to ask for the username again if the previous one is taken.
I suppose I could add conditions here to invalidate it for other reasons like min or max string or even if it contained offensive words or invalid characters. I dont really have a need for this at the moment and I’m not sure how to do it so I’m going to move on for new.

here is the output of the script (or the user bit anyway.)

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Linux: Check if a User or a Group Exists 2

You can find out if user exists by searching in the /etc/passwd file using the following command:

The above command will print the matching record from /etc/passwd if the user exists or nothing if the user does not exist.
The ^ symbol is used to make sure there is no characters before the username and the : character is used as the delimiter in the file (which indicates the end of the username). By wrapping the username with these characters we are sure that if we matched a record, we matched the correct record with the full username.

A very simple way to use this code in a script is by utilizing the $? (question mark) variable. The question mark variable contains the exit status of the last command that executed. Specifically, egrep will return 0 if there was a match or else it will return a a positive number (usually 1).
Taking advantage of this behavior, after executing the above command, we check the $? variable to see the result with an if statement.

You can also find out if a group exists by searching in the /etc/group file. Similar to the approach we showed before, we can check if a group exists using the following:

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2 thoughts on “ Linux: Check if a User or a Group Exists ”

Shouldn’t it be this?
(note the “:”)
egrep -i “^useraccount:” /etc/passwd

otherwise if user “useraccount1” exists – you’ll match it.

You are right. I changed the call in the article.

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Find out if user name exists

How can I find out, in a shell script, whether a given user name exists on the current system?

/etc/passwd and /etc/shadow are incomplete. Consider OS X’s Directory Services, or Linux with Likewise Active Directory integration.

4 Answers 4

One of the most basic tools to be used for that is probably id .

getent

This command is designed to gather entries for the databases that can be backed by /etc files and various remote services like LDAP, AD, NIS/Yellow Pages, DNS and the likes.

To figure out if a username is known by one of the password naming services, simply run:

This works also with group, hosts and others, depending on the OS and implementation.

finger

Parse the output of finger -m . No error code if no user was found, unfortunately, but if not found, error output will be written. No drawbacks so far.

Will print 0 if user is found (because there’s no error output), larger numbers otherwise.

chown

Run (as any user, surprisingly):

If it fails as root , the account name is invalid.

If it fails as non- root user, parse the possibly localized output for Operation not permitted or invalid user (or equivalents). Set LANG beforehand to do this reliably.

I would say that you would want to rely on /etc/passwd and similar (e.g. /etc/shadow for Shadow-based systems; on an off-topic side-note, some similar systems might use /etc/master.passwd or other such files).

The /etc/passwd is typically treated as the absolute authoritative decision on whether a user exists or not. If you use any of the other methods described on this page, and if those other methods point to an existing user but /etc/passwd does not, then I would say that the user does not properly exist on the system, by definition of the most common standard that software would likely rely on.

That said, I’ll throw in another way to add to the mix of some other options that could be used.

ls -l /home | grep ^customUserName$
echo $?

Clearly, replace «customuserName» with the name of the user you want to check for. Replace /home with /users if that is what your system uses. This might not find all users in /etc/passwd if no home directory was made for the particular user, which could occur if you simply imported users (that is, lines of text into /etc/passwd) and if home directories don’t get made unless/until a person logs in.

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