How to list all users in a Linux group?

Question

How do I list all members of a group in Linux (and possibly other unices)?

Answer 1

Here is a script which returns a list of users from /etc/passwd and /etc/group it doesn't check NIS or LDAP, but it does show users who have the group as their default group Tested on Debian 4.7 and solaris 9

#!/bin/bash

MYGROUP="user"

# get the group ID
MYGID=`grep $MYGROUP /etc/group | cut -d ":" -f3`
if [[ $MYGID != "" ]]
then
  # get a newline-separated list of users from /etc/group 
  MYUSERS=`grep $MYGROUP /etc/group | cut -d ":" -f4| tr "," "\n"`
  # add a newline
  MYUSERS=$MYUSERS$'\n'
  # add the users whose default group is MYGROUP from /etc/passwod 
  MYUSERS=$MYUSERS`cat /etc/passwd |grep $MYGID | cut -d ":" -f1`

  #print the result as a newline-separated list with no duplicates (ready to pass into a bash FOR loop)
  printf '%s\n' $MYUSERS  | sort | uniq
fi

or as a one-liner you can cut and paste straight from here (change the group name in the first variable)

MYGROUP="user";MYGID=`grep $MYGROUP /etc/group | cut -d ":" -f3`;printf '%s\n' `grep $MYGROUP /etc/group | cut -d ":" -f4| tr "," "\n"`$'\n'`cat /etc/passwd |grep $MYGID | cut -d ":" -f1`  | sort | uniq