Files have owner as uid number rather than username

prollocks · 11-18-2009, 08:00 AM

Hello all,

On my RHES4 I noticed a load of files which had owner set as the owners uid rather than the actual username - is this usual behaviour ?

On a similar system the same files actually have the username as the owner.

It's just causing me issues as I have changed the users ID and now some thing's wont start meaning I have to manually do a find and chown on the system.

Cheers

Prollocks

Komakino · 11-18-2009, 08:06 AM

Is this not caused by you changing the user ID? The ID will show if there is no user matching that ID, for example I had the same thing when I moved a home partition from one system to another because on the first system UID 1001 was associated with the user bob, but on system 2 there was no user bob so it just showed as 1001.

prollocks · 11-18-2009, 10:07 AM

Most probably right - but if a users ID is changed surely his files should still belong to him rather than his old ID? (on the same machine that is)

catkin · 11-18-2009, 10:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by prollocks

Most probably right - but if a users ID is changed surely his files should still belong to him rather than his old ID? (on the same machine that is)

Perhaps it should but that is not the way UNIX and Linux are designed. If you want that you can do it with the find command using the -user option to identify the files-and-directories and the -exec option with the chown command.

chrism01 · 11-18-2009, 07:08 PM

Note that in reality, all file ownerships (user & group) are recorded by uid/gid. The name just appears when you do an ls -l if(!) there are matching entries in /etc/passwd & /etc/group. Just like DNS, names are for humans only; the system always uses numbers.

If you used usermod to alter the uid, then

Quote:

-u, --uid UID
The numerical value of the user's ID. This value must be unique, unless the -o option is used. The value must be non-negative. Values between 0 and 999 are typically reserved for system accounts. Any files which the user owns and which are located in the directory tree rooted at the user's home directory will have the file user ID changed automatically. Files outside of the user's home directory must be altered manually.

If you did it manually (ie edited /etc/passwd) then nothing else is updated.