How to get all Windows/Linux user and not only current user with python

Question

I know how to get the current user using os or getpass.getuser(), but is there a way to get a list of all user and not only the current one? Read os and getpass documentations but i didn't thing anything.

Answer 1

This is OS-specific.

In Linux, see Python script to list users and groups.

In Windows:

• via WMI

  • parse the output of wmic UserAccount get Name, or

  • make the same call with the wmi module:

    import wmi
    w=wmi.WMI()
    # The argument (field filter) is only really needed if browsing a large domain
    # as per the warning at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/cimwin32prov/win32-useraccount
    # Included it for the sake of completeness
    for u in w.Win32_UserAccount(["Name"]): #Net
        print u.Name
    del u
    

• via the NetUserEnum API

  • parse the output of net user, or

  • make the same call with pywin32:

    import win32net, win32netcon
    names=[]; resumeHandle=0
    while True:
        data,_,resumeHandle=win32net.NetUserEnum(None,0,
                win32netcon.FILTER_NORMAL_ACCOUNT,resumeHandle)
        names.extend(e["name"] for e in data)
        if not resumeHandle: break
    del data,resumeHandle
    print names
    

Answer 2

Two ideas for methods that are Windows-specific:

from pathlib import Path
users = [x.name for x in Path(r'C:\Users').glob('*') if x.name not in ['Default', 'Default User', 'Public', 'All Users'] and x.is_dir()]
print(users)

Paths in C:\Users

import os
os.system('net user > users.txt')
users = Path('./users.txt').read_text()
print(users)

Output from net user