Find local accounts with shell login

I spent some time building this query so I thought I’d write it down. To find out which accounts in /etc/passwd with a UID greater than 500 have anything other than nologin or false set as their login shell, combine grep & awk to print them out:

grep -v 'nologin\|false' /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{if($3>500)print}'

grep -v: exclude results
awk -F: use colon as a field separator
{if($3>500)print: if the third column using the above colon separator is greater than 500, print the line

If running this command via salt cmd.run, you must use double quotes and escape the $ to get it to work properly:

salt <hostname> cmd.run "grep -v 'nologin\|false' /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{if(\$3>500)print}'"

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.