nixCraft

guzenkov · #1 (**permalink**) 05-18-2008, 10:27 PM

The thing I learnt a few days ago is that users to whom this particular group is primary will not be listed in /etc/group and by groupmem command. However users' primary groups are listed in /etc/passwd. But how can I view all members (no matter whether it is primary or secondary to them) of the group?

nixcraft · #2 (**permalink**) 05-18-2008, 10:32 PM

To print the groups a user is in use groups command. For example print all groupname vivek user belongs to:

Code:

groups vivek

Sample output:

Code:

vivek : vivek adm dialout cdrom floppy audio dip video plugdev scanner netdev lpadmin powerdev admin dba vboxusers

However, to find out all members of a group, type following

Code:

egrep "^groupname" /etc/group 
egrep "^adm" /etc/group 
egrep "^ftpusers" /etc/group

HTH

guzenkov · #3 (**permalink**) 05-18-2008, 10:46 PM

/etc/group WILL NOT list users, to whom this groups is primary! It lists ONLY those users, to whom this groups is secondary.

guzenkov · #4 (**permalink**) 05-18-2008, 10:57 PM

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# useradd x -g users
[root@localhost ~]# egrep "^users" /etc/group
users:x:100:
[root@localhost ~]# id x
uid=502(x) gid=100(users) Gruppen=100(users)

rockdalinux · #5 (**permalink**) 05-19-2008, 01:01 AM

Try

Code:

 id -G -n username

The -G will print all group IDs and -n will print in human readable format.

Here is an example:

Code:

useradd rocky
id -Gn rocky

Create a secondary group called ftp

Code:

groupadd ftp

Add rocky to secondary group called ftp

Code:

usermod -a -G ftp rocky

Now print all membeship

Code:

id -Gn rocky

You should see rocky as primary and ftp as secondary group.

guzenkov · #6 (**permalink**) 05-19-2008, 01:20 AM

Firstly, your examples work with supplementary groups, not primary as is required in my question. Secondly, you show to what groups user belongs, but the question is what users belong to the group.

rockdalinux · #7 (**permalink**) 05-19-2008, 01:34 AM

So you want command to print ALL members of a group. For example, if I type
somecommand GROUPNAME

It should print list of users in both primary and secondary group. Am i right? if so you need to write a small shell script to query both /etc/passwd and /etc/group. Lemme know so that I can come with something.

edit: Have you tried members command?

Code:

members  --all groupname
members  --all ftp

From the man page:
members is a program that sends a space-separated list of secondary and primary member names to its standard output.

guzenkov · #8 (**permalink**) 05-19-2008, 02:07 AM

Thank you, rockdalinux.
It looks like you got it. I think members command does it, but the problem that I don't have such command in the repositories of neither Archlinux, nor madriva (the two distributions I currently work with). Thus it does not apply to them.
I will be really surprised if this simple task is not performed by some standard linux tool.

rockdalinux · #9 (**permalink**) 05-19-2008, 02:21 AM

You are welcome.

You can grab source code from Debian repo - http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool...90831-5.tar.gz and always compile it on any Linux distro.

Code:

wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/m/members/members_19990831-5.tar.gz
tar zxvf members_19990831-5.tar.gz
cd members-19990831/
make
./members groupname
make install
cd 
members ftp

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any way to view view ALL members of a group?

any way to view view ALL members of a group?

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