Is there a command to list all Unix group names?

If you want all groups known to the system, I would recommend using getent group instead of parsing /etc/group:

getent group

The reason is that on networked systems, groups may not only read from /etc/group file, but also obtained through LDAP or Yellow Pages (the list of known groups comes from the local group file plus groups received via LDAP or YP in these cases).

If you want just the group names you can use:

getent group | cut -d: -f1

4 years ago

On Linux, macOS and Unix to display the groups to which you belong, use:

id -Gn

which is equivalent to groups utility which has been obsoleted on Unix (as per Unix manual).
On macOS and Unix, the command id -p is suggested for normal interactive.
Explanation of the parameters:

-G, --groups - print all group IDs

-n, --name - print a name instead of a number, for -ugG

-p - Make the output human-readable.

4 years ago