List of all users and groups
c, cocoa, macos, macos-carbon, objective-c
Solution
The tool you want is almost certainly dscl. The shortest way to do it was already pointed out:
$ dscl . list /users
$ dscl . list /groups
If you want to output information about each user, though, use `readall`:
$ dscl . readall /users
$ dscl . readall /groups
And if you need to programatically parse said information, use -plist to make your life easier:
$ dscl -plist . readall /users
$ dscl -plist . readall /groups
Problem
I'm trying to get a list of all users and all groups on Mac OS X 10.5+. How can I do this? For example, the list of all users on my machine should return: `_amavisd, _appowner, _appserver, _ard, _atsserver, _calendar, _carddav, _clamav, _coreaudiod, _cvmsroot, _cvs, _cyrus, _devdocs, _dovecot, _eppc, _installer, _jabber, _lda, _locationd, _lp, _mailman, _mcxalr, _mdnsresponder, _mysql, _pcastagent, _pcastserver, _postfix, _qtss, _sandbox, _screensaver, _securityagent, _serialnumberd, _softwareupdate, _spotlight, _sshd, _svn, _teamsserver, _timezone, _tokend, _trustevaluationagent, _unknown, _update_sharing, _usbmuxd, _uucp, _windowserver, _www, _xgridagent, _xgridcontroller, daemon, dave, nobody, root` (that was painstakingly compiled manually). How can I get that list (and the corresponding list of all groups) programmatically? I'm open to alternative (non-c based) solutions, such as Applescript, commandline, etc. Update a long time later TALlama's answer prompted me to investigate the API to Open Directory, and I found that this list can be easily acquired programmatically: ``` #import <OpenDirectory/OpenDirectory.h> ODSession *s = [ODSession defaultSession]; ODNode *root = [ODNode nodeWithSession:s name:@"/Local/Default" error:nil]; ODQuery *q = [ODQuery queryWithNode:root forRecordTypes:kODRecordTypeUsers attribute:nil matchType:0 queryValues:nil returnAttributes:nil maximumResults:0 error:nil]; NSArray *results = [q resultsAllowingPartial:NO error:nil]; for (ODRecord *r in results) { NSLog(@"%@", [r recordName]); } ``` That will log the usernames of every user on the system. Substituting in `kODRecordTypeGroups` will get you the list of all the groups. The `-[ODQuery resultsAllowingPartial:error:]` method is a blocking call, so you'd either want to execute this code on a background thread, or use an `<ODQueryDelegate>` to aggregate the results.