As a system administrator, you can create and manage groups for the user accounts on your Linux system. This way, you can assign administrative & configuration rights to Ubuntu users and files & folder access permissions to an entire group rather than a single user at a time. Sometimes you might need to know which user group a user belongs to verify or perform group management operations or to assign/de-assigning user rights. This article will describe the commands step-by-step that can be used to determine which group a user is a member of.
Open the Ubuntu Terminal through Ctrl+Alt+T or the Dash or connect to the Ubuntu system by SSH.
Enter the following command to see which group the current user belongs to:
$ groups
This command lists all the groups that you belong to.
Enter the following command to check which group a particular user belongs to:
$ groups [username]
You can also use the following command to list the group members and their GIDs.
$ id [username]
Here is an example for the ‘guest’ user:
The gid output represents the primary group assigned to a user.
Enter the exit command in order to close the terminal window in case you do not want to work further.
Through this simple procedure, you can perform a simple check of a user account’s group information.