How to find out what group a given user has?

Question

In Unix/Linux, how do you find out what group a given user is in via command line?

To get the opposite, see who is in a given group, you can use `getent group `. — iconoclast, Sep 27 '12 at 20:19
@iconoclast : which doesn’t list users belonging to the group in /etc/passwd. — user2284570, Dec 13 '15 at 13:47

score 406 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 08 '08 at 16:54

406

groups

or

groups user

answered Dec 08 '08 at 16:54

Bombe

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Paul Tomblin · Answer 2 · 2013-06-19T15:00:29.730

109

This one shows the user's uid as well as all the groups (with their gids) they belong to

id userid

edited Jun 19 '13 at 15:00

answered Dec 08 '08 at 16:54

Paul Tomblin

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This appears to be pretty useful as well. It has more verbose output than the 'groups' command, so if you need the group id/user id use this! – Alex Argo Dec 08 '08 at 17:02
This should be the most detailed and correct answer, have an upvote! – Harvey Lin Aug 14 '18 at 18:23

score 19 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

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On Linux/OS X/Unix to display the groups to which you (or the optionally specified user) belong, use:

id -Gn [user]

which is equivalent to groups [user] utility which has been obsoleted on Unix.

On OS X/Unix, the command id -p [user] is suggested for normal interactive.

Explanation on the parameters:

-G, --groups - print all group IDs

-n, --name - print a name instead of a number, for -ugG

-p - Make the output human-readable.

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered Apr 13 '15 at 22:02

kenorb

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`-p` would be super useful in GNU id. – RonJohn Feb 01 '23 at 15:49

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 08 '08 at 17:14

0

or just study /etc/groups (ok this does probably not work if it uses pam with ldap)

answered Dec 08 '08 at 17:14

Nils

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Indeed, that's a bad answer. 'getent group' is a better one. – bortzmeyer Dec 15 '08 at 13:58

score 0 · Answer 5 · edited May 04 '20 at 15:20

Below is the script which is integrated into ansible and generating dashboard in CSV format.

sh collection.sh

#!/bin/bash

HOSTNAME=`hostname -s`

for i in `cat /etc/passwd| grep -vE "nologin|shutd|hal|sync|root|false"|awk -F':' '{print$1}' | sed 's/[[:space:]]/,/g'`; do groups $i; done|sed s/\:/\,/g|tr -d ' '|sed -e "s/^/$HOSTNAME,/"> /tmp/"$HOSTNAME"_inventory.txt

sudo cat /etc/sudoers| grep -v "^#"|awk '{print $1}'|grep -v Defaults|sed '/^$/d;s/[[:blank:]]//g'>/tmp/"$HOSTNAME"_sudo.txt

paste -d , /tmp/"$HOSTNAME"_inventory.txt /tmp/"$HOSTNAME"_sudo.txt|sed 's/,[[:blank:]]*$//g' >/tmp/"$HOSTNAME"_inventory_users.txt

My output stored in below text files.

cat /tmp/ANSIBLENODE_sudo.txt
cat /tmp/ANSIBLENODE_inventory.txt
cat /tmp/ANSIBLENODE_inventory_users.txt

How to find out what group a given user has?

5 Answers5

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