Print unique names of users logged on with finger - bash

Question

I'm trying to write a shell script that prints the full names of users logged on to a machine. The finger command gives me a list of users, but there are many duplicates. How can I loop through and print out only the unique ones?
Edit:
This is the format of what finger gives me:
xxxx XX of group XXX pts/59 1:00 Feb 13 16:38
xxxx XX of group XXX pts/71 1:11 Feb 13 16:27
xxxx XX of group XXX pts/105 1d Feb 12 15:22
xxxx YY of group YYY pts/102 2:19 Feb 13 14:13
xxxx ZZ of group ZZZ pts/42 2d Feb 7 12:11
I'm trying to extract the full name (i.e. whatever comes before 'of group' in column 2), so I would be using awk together with finger.

Answer 1

What you want is actually fairly difficult in a shell script, here is, for example, my full output of finger(1):
Login Name TTY Idle Login Time Office Phone
martin Martin Tournoij *v0 1d Wed 14:11
martin Martin Tournoij pts/2 22 Wed 15:37
martin Martin Tournoij pts/5 41 Thu 23:16
martin Martin Tournoij pts/7 31 Thu 23:24
martin Martin Tournoij pts/8 Thu 23:29
You want the full name, but this may contain 1 space (as per my example), or it may just be 'Teller' (no space), or it may be 'Captain James T. Kirk' (3 spaces). So you can't just use the space as delimiter. You could use the character position of 'TTY' in the header as an indicator, but that's not very elegant IMHO (especially with shell scripting).
My solution is therefore slightly different, we get only the username from finger(1), then we get the full name from /etc/passwd
#!/bin/sh
prev=""
for u in $(finger | tail +2 | cut -w -f1 | sort); do
[ "$u" = "$prev" ] && continue
echo "$u $(grep "^$u" /etc/passwd | cut -d: -f5)"
prev="$u"
done
Which gives me both the username & login name:
martin Martin Tournoij
Obviously, you can also print just the real name (without the $u).

Answer 2

The sort and uniq BinUtils commands can be used to removed duplicates.
finger | sort -u
This will remove all duplicate lines, but you will still see similar lines due to how verbose the finger command is. If you just want a list of usernames, you can filter it out further to be very specific.
finger | cut -d ' ' -f1 | sort -u
Now, you can take this one step further, and remove the "header/label" line printed out by the finger command.
finger | cut -d ' ' -f1 | sort -u | grep -iv login
Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Other possible solution:
finger | tail -n +2 | awk '{ print $1 }' | sort | uniq
tail -n +2 to omit the first line.
awk '{ print $1 }' to extract the first column.
sort to prepare input for uniq.
uniq remove duplicates.
If you want to iterate use:
for user in $(finger | tail -n +2 | awk '{ print $1 }' | sort | uniq)
do
echo "$user"
done

Answer 4

Could this be simpler?
No spaces or any other special characters to worry about!
finger -l | awk '/^Login/'
Edit: To remove the content after of group
finger -l | awk '/^Login/' | sed 's/of group.*//g'
Output:
Login: xx Name: XX
Login: yy Name: YY
Login: zz Name: ZZ