If you find yourself wondering what on earth some of the system accounts and process user ID accounts in the aforementioned lists are, this approach offers more details, including the gecos description for each account (for example, _qtss user is the QuickTime Streaming Server daemon) Show All User Accounts, User Directories, & User GECOS Info on a MacĪnother approach would be to show and list a detailed account list of user accounts, the associated user account directory, and the user account GECOS info (which is usually a description of the account or a full user name). You’ll get a much shorter list of user names returned as a result, but you’ll still find three user names included that are not typical user accounts, but are normal to be found on Mac OS X installs daemon, nobody, and root. This command will filter out any of the _ underscore prefixed daemon users, which are not actually user accounts. If the complete list of users is thus undesirable, you can easily exclude all the _underscore daemon and process accounts by running the output through grep, as we’ll show next. This would include usernames like Paul, Bob, Jill, but also daemons, system accounts, and process users like networkd, windowserver, daemon, nobody, root, _spotlight, _ard, _appserver, _iconservices, and many more. The benefit (or trouble) with this approach is that it lists not only all user accounts on a Mac but it also shows every daemon and server process account. We’ll then use the ‘dscl’ command, which works in all versions of Mac OS X system software. Open the Terminal if you haven’t done so already, either on the local machine you want to list user accounts for, or by connecting to a remote Mac you’d like to see the user accounts on. How to List All User Accounts on a Mac from Command Line

But, by turning to the command line you can reveal all user accounts on a Mac, whether they are general user accounts of active users, admin accounts, as well as any system account. As a result, while those approaches may be appropriate for the casual Mac user looking to show what users they have on a computer, neither of those methods are particularly sufficient for most admin needs.

Additionally, the existence of a name in the /Users/ directory is not foolproof, because you can delete a user account but preserve that users home directory. A few preliminary basic approaches to this would be to access the login screen or to list the contents of the /Users directory, though if a user account is hidden then it would not display at the login screen and it’s equally simple to obfuscate a user from the /Users folder.

Mac console commands list