How to see users in alphabetical order?

Question

I want to know how to see the users by alphabetical order when using this command:

cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd

I get a list with a lot of names including mine but it's very long. I want to order it alphabetically.

How I can do this? Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Simplest:

cut -d: -f1  /etc/passwd | sort  

To also view the user(s) information from the terminal type:

grep /home /etc/passwd | sort 

The /home tells grep to drop any lines that do not contain the text /home thereby filtering out many lines that don't have information about users from the results of the command. In Ubuntu the user directories are located in the /home directory by default. This command will show several attributes for each user. The user attributes are:

username:password:UID:GID:info:home directory:shell

Answer 2

If you want just to sort only the names (after cut) use Rinzwind's answer.

If you want to sort the /etc/passwd file alphabetically based on the usernames:

sort -t: -k1,1 /etc/passwd 

Answer 3

Use the compgen command piped with sort:

compgen -u | sort

Answer 4

You could do this through python itself. Just run the below command on terminal.

$ python3 -c 'with open("/etc/passwd") as f:
    for i in sorted([x.split(":")[0] for x in f]):
        print(i)'

Note that the spaces before for was very important.