getent is a unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 command that helps a user get entries in a number of important text files called databases. This includes the passwd and group databases which store user information – hence getent is a common way to look up user details on Unix. Since getent uses the same name service as the system, getent will show all information, including that gained from network information sources such as LDAP.

The databases it searches in are: ahosts, ahostsv4, ahostsv6, aliases, ethers (Ethernet addresses), group, gshadow, hosts, netgroup, networks, passwd

Passwd (file)

In Unix-like operating systems the /etc/passwd file is a text-based database of information about users that may login to the system or other operating system user identities that own running processes....

, protocols, rpc, services, and shadow.

The general syntax is:

getent database [key ...]

Thorsten Kukuk wrote the getent utility for the GNU C Library

GNU C Library

The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the C standard library released by the GNU Project. Originally written by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU operating system, the library's development has been overseen by a committee since 2001, with Ulrich Drepper from Red Hat as the lead...

.

Examples

Fetch list of user accounts on a Unix system (stored in a database called 'passwd'). This will show all user accounts, regardless of the type of name service used. For example, if both local and LDAP name service are used for user accounts, the results will include all local and LDAP users:

getent passwd

Fetch details for a particular user called joe:

getent passwd joe

Fetch list of group accounts on a Unix system (stored in a database called 'group'):

getent group