Distro/DE neutral method of changing someone's UserID

Howdy There,

Is there a DE/distro neutral (I guess CLI) method of changing a given user's user ID on a Linux system? I want to set all my systems to have the same UserID so my external hard drive stops giving permission errors when moving between them.

Regards,
~Jeff

"usermod -u <newUID> <username>"

That's what I use on RHEL/CentOS and Debian. So far as I know that is distro neutral but it wouldn't surprise me if there weren't odd ones in the world that don't use it for some reason.

Once you've changed it you might want to check the local filesystems for any files owned by the old UID and chown them:
find / -user <oldUID> |xargs chown <newUID>

Originally Posted by MensaWater "usermod -u <newUID> <username>" That's what I use on RHEL/CentOS and Debian. So far as I know that is distro neutral but it wouldn't surprise me if there weren't odd ones in the world that don't use it for some reason. Once you've changed it you might want to check the local filesystems for any files owned by the old UID and chown them: find / -user <oldUID> |xargs chown <newUID>

Worked like a charm. Thanks mate.

~Jeff

Glad I could help.

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