How do I check what 'normal' users are there on the system?

Question

I want to find out what 'normal' users are available on a system. By normal, I mean those who are manually created, not those like sshd or gdm.

Answer 1

Typically "normal users" are assigned user ID's >= 1000. If this is the case on your system, then the following could work:

awk -F: '{if ($3 > 999) print $1}' /etc/passwd

Answer 2

Do grep UID_MIN /etc/login.defs. Then do getent passwd and look which users have a UID >= the UID_MIN value from above.

Explanation: Whenever a user is manually added, it grabs the first available UID >= the UID_MIN value from login.defs (unless UID is manually specified)

Answer 3

I don't think there's a way to tell which users have been "manually created". Probably the best you can do is look for users that have a valid shell, as typically system users like sshd and gdm have shells like /bin/false and /sbin/nologin to prevent logins. The list of valid shells is in /etc/shells, so you can use grep to get a list of users with one of those shells:

$ grep -f /etc/shells /etc/passwd

If you just want usernames:

$ grep -f /etc/shells /etc/passwd | cut -d: -f1

Answer 4

ls -l /home

But that's also not the most reliable source.

If once logged in:

lastlog | grep -v 'Never logged in'