What's the easiest way to get a user's full name on a Linux/POSIX system?

Question

I could grep through /etc/passwd but that seems onerous. \'finger\' isn\'t installed and I\'d like to avoid that dependency. This is for a program so it would be nice if there

Answer 1

Just in case you want to do this from C, try something like this:

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

/* Get full name of a user, given their username. Return 0 for not found,
   -1 for error, or 1 for success. Copy name to `fullname`, but only up
   to max-1 chars (max includes trailing '\0'). Note that if the GECOS
   field contains commas, only up to to (but not including) the first comma
   is copied, since the commas are a convention to add more than just the
   name into the field, e.g., room number, phone number, etc. */
static int getfullname(const char *username, char *fullname, size_t max)
{
    struct passwd *p;
    size_t n;

    errno = 0;
    p = getpwnam(username);
    if (p == NULL && errno == 0)
        return 0;
    if (p == NULL)
        return -1;
    if (max == 0)
        return 1;
    n = strcspn(p->pw_gecos, ",");
    if (n > max - 1)
        n = max - 1;
    memcpy(fullname, p->pw_gecos, n);
    fullname[n] = '\0';
    return 1;
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    int i;
    int ret;
    char fullname[1024];

    for (i = 1; i < argc; ++i) {
        ret = getfullname(argv[i], fullname, sizeof fullname);
        if (ret == -1)
            printf("ERROR: %s: %s\n", argv[i], strerror(errno));
        else if (ret == 0)
            printf("UNKONWN: %s\n", argv[i]);
        else
            printf("%s: %s\n", argv[i], fullname);
    }
    return 0;
}