What's the easiest way to get a user's full name on a Linux/POSIX system?

Question

I could grep through /etc/passwd but that seems onerous. \'finger\' isn\'t installed and I\'d like to avoid that dependency. This is for a program so it would be nice if there

Answer 1

The way that I figured it on Linux to get the full name into a variable was:

u_id=`id -u`
uname=`awk -F: -vid=$u_id '{if ($3 == id) print $5}' /etc/passwd`

Then just simple use the variable, ex: $ echo $uname