Ubuntu 14.10

Some files have owner as number

Why is it that some files or directories have the owner as a number rather than a name?

My ls -la listing for /var/www/html/ | grep moodle gives

drwxr-xr-x 45 1005 1005 4096 Jan 12 13.53 moodle

Who or what is 1005?

There is no such owner in /etc/passwd

How can linux store meaningful permissions information for a user or group that does not seem to exist?

Thank you

Ths most common cause of files with unknown UIDs is because the previous owner account has been deleted.

Files outside the home directory and a few other locations such as the mail spool are not automatically removed when a user account is removed.

Who installed moodle, or who has had access to the html tree?

It is also worth noting that tar will allow you to open an archive and keep the original uid/gid - which may not exist on your system. It is possible that an ill-behaved installer may have created those with a non-existent owner.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks astrogeek,

Going on what you say it doesn't seem to be intentional.

I installed Ubuntu + moodle. Moodle was installed by it's own PHP install script.

I've installed it on a VirtualBox machine on another computer so I had a look at that which has owner www-data, which makes sense to me.

I can only assume that I botched the chown at some stage.

So I've set it back to www-data.

The site still seems to work.

Thanks again

Great! Glad to help.

Files with nonexistent owners are not a problem of themselves and do occur at times. And as you say, easy enough to simply change ownership and fix.

Good luck!