Macos – Mac OSX: users vs dscl command to list user

macos

I executed those two commands in terminal:

users

and 

dscl . -read /Users/

and then they tell me two different results. The second one gave me a long list while the first one just showed my username on Mac.

When I google for "List users on Mac", most will tell me use the second one. However when I execute "man users", it shows me that this command is to "list current Users".

Could you tell me the differences?

Also, how do I execute a command as mysql user. The following command didn't work:

mkdir mysqldir --user mysql

Best Answer

dscl . -read /Users/ doesn't print anything particularly interesting; you probably mean dscl . -ls /Users, which prints a list of user accounts that are defined on your computer (including a great many normally-hidden system accounts). users, on the other hand, prints a list of users who are currently logged in on your computer (usually just you).

For your second question: you can use the sudo command to run commands as another user (e.g. sudo -u _mysql mkdir mysqldir). Note that this requires admin rights, and will ask you to enter your password for verification.

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