What is the shell command to tell me how many users there are on the system with a certain first name and whose username starts with a 'b'?

Question

I have managed to get the total number of users on the system with this:

$ getent passwd | wc -l

I need the number of users on the system with a certain first name (for example 'Josh') and whose usernames start with a 'b'. How? I don't know the syntax for this.

Answer 1

You can try something like:

getent passwd|awk -F: '$5 ~ /^Josh([ ,.]|$)/ && $1 ~ /^b/'|wc -l