How To List Users in Linux

Linux is a multiuser operating system, so creating numerous user accounts is easy. Over time, it’s easy to lose track of which accounts are required. Listing user accounts helps you manage them.

Advances in technology often bring their own new problems. As soon as computers were able to support multiple users, the need to ring-fence and encapsulate each person’s work from everyone else became apparent. This led to the concept of user accounts. Each user has a named ID and a password. These are the credentials that let them log into their account. Their files are kept in an area that is private to each user.

On a busy system, it is easy to lose sight of which accounts you have created, and which are no longer needed. From a security point of view, it is bad practice to keep user accounts that you no longer need to be configured and accessible on your computer. You should remove those users.