The FreeBSD Diary

cat /etc/passwd | cut -d: -f1 | grep -v \#

The cut command selects portions of a file.  We use ":" as the delimiting character.  And we want only the first field.  The grep eliminates lines with # in them, which normally appear at the start of the password file.

Exercises for the interested and motivated:

• try the above command without the grep
• remove the \ before the #
• try -f5 instead of -f1.

Hope that helps.

My thanks to halflife for the original idea and to pal for adding the grep.