How can I show all the Users in Users & Groups - Sequoia?

dandeliondigital wrote:

I came across this sentence "If you already deleted the macOS user account from within the "Users & Groups" System Settings, then it is safe to delete the folder or .dmg file for that former account." .......I am asking you if you think this means that if the Users do not show in the Users & Groups pane of Sequoia, I can simply delete them from my Mac? If I did, do you know if there are any hidden files that should be deleted or verified as being gone?

If you have DMG files of the old user accounts in the "/Users" folder, then it means at some point in the past you deleted those users and saved their home users folders. If you don't need anything within those DMG files, then delete them.

Hi Barney-15E,

You said:

You’ll probably need to use dscl in the command line. I don’t know how to use it.

I don't either. I've only used the command line to solve issues that crop up from time to time, (like this),

Here is the command to see all the regular macOS user accounts:

dscl  .  list  /Users  |  grep  -v  '^_'



If you see a macOS user account in that output which doesn't appear on the login screen or Users & Groups, then you can use the following command to see if that particular account is hidden (replace "<user-name>" with the actual user name such as "hwtech" in my case):

dscl  .  read  /Users/<user-name>  IsHidden

FYI, the first command will show several macOS system user accounts, daemon, root, and nobody so just ignore those three.

dandeliondigital wrote:

My Users folder as shown by the Terminal CMD you provided shows the System Accts I can ignore, my current operational User Acct, and the 4 other accounts that are what I will call "Legacy accounts". Those accounts do not appear in the System Settings Users & Groups Pane of Users.

Are these "Legacy accounts" shown in the Terminal the same ones that you can log into?

I can log into all of these accounts. Even though I set the preference to show all users in a list, I do not get a list as I could get in the past in the Settings Users & Groups Pane on the startup screen. I simply get Name and Password fields, and after I log in an icon called Other shows - which seems very odd.

I have seen this occur from time to time with some of my organization's Macs. I forget which macOS was the first where I saw it (probably Big Sur or Monterey). Sometimes I would see the normal list of users, but one would be missing. It was always due to one of the macOS user accounts being hidden.

Did you try the second Terminal command to see if any of those "Legacy accounts" have the "IsHidden" flag set? Here is an example using my user name "hwtech":

dscl  .  read  /Users/hwtech  IsHidden

I want to delete all the users except my main User Administration account.

What do you recommend I do to get this back on track? I would really appreciate any help. If you do not have any answers, but can show me how to delete my old "Legacy accounts" in Terminal that might be the best way to at least get started solving this.

I'm sure it is possible, but I've never done it. It is important to remove all aspects of each user account. IIRC, when using the command line to create macOS user accounts, there are multiple steps.....so it would require multiple steps in the correct order to remove them as well. It has been some years since I even looked at using the command line to create macOS user accounts.

Also, I would really like to fix this so that if I created a new User it would show up in the System Settings Users & Groups Pane of Users correctly.

I'm betting that something was configured to making all new user accounts default to hidden. I have no idea how that would occur or where that setting is stored, or what command could be used to change it back. Unfortunately macOS is not well documented in this regard (actually most of macOS is not well documented when you leave the confines of the GUI interface).

If this has occurred, I would be concerned about what else could have been changed which you have yet to notice or discover.

There isn’t a setting that hides some users.

It is possible to create users with a User ID in the 400’s such that it won’t appear in the GUI, but that would have to have been done in the command line. Did you create them that way?

In OS X Users were hidden until you unlocked the pane (remember that?)

No, but that is irrelevant as that is not how it works, now.

but now they are just not there. I need to see them to DELETE them.

You’ll probably need to use dscl in the command line. I don’t know how to use it.