

When you're creating a file, you're the owner of this file. I hope you are familiar with the file permission concept in Linux. UIDs are unique to one another and thus they can also be used to identify ownership of different system resources such as files and processes. find / -user old_uid_of_user_2 -exec chown -h user_2 \ How does UID associate with different system resources?
GID LINUX UPDATE
What you can do is manually update the ownership of the files associated with the old UID of the user_2. When you update the UID of a user, what happens to the files owned by this user?While all the files in the home directory of user_2 will have their associated UID changed, you’ll have to manually update the associated UID of other files outside the home directory. You need to have superuser privilege to execute the above command.ĭo you remember the file permission and ownership concept in Linux? The ownership of a file is determined by the UID of the owner user. You can change the UID by modifying the user using usermod command like this: usermod -u 1004 user_2 Now you want its UID to be taken by another user already on the system. You had to delete a user because he/she left the organization. Suppose you had several users on your Linux system.
GID LINUX HOW TO
Uid=1001(standard) gid=1001(standard) groups=1001(standard) How to change UID of a user in Linux? You can also specify the user names with the id command to get the UID of any Linux user: id standard The id command in Linux will display the UID, GID and groups your current user belongs to: id That’s not the only way to get the UID information in Linux. You can always rely on the /etc/passwd file to get the UID of a user. In Linux, UID 0 and GID 0 is reserved for the root user. In Ubuntu and Fedora, UID for new users start from 1000.įor example, if you use adduser or useradd command to create a new user, it will get the next available number after 1000 as its UID. UID and GID in /etc/passwd File in Linuxĭo note that in most Linux distributions, UID 1-500 are usually reserved for system users. The third field here represents the user ID or UID. News:x:9:9:news:/var/spool/news:/usr/sbin/nologin Mail:x:8:8:mail:/var/mail:/usr/sbin/nologin Lp:x:7:7:lp:/var/spool/lpd:/usr/sbin/nologin Man:x:6:12:man:/var/cache/man:/usr/sbin/nologin Games:x:5:60:games:/usr/games:/usr/sbin/nologin Use a Linux command to view text file and you’ll see various information about the users present on your system. This is the same file that can be used to list all the users in a Linux system. You can find UID stored in the /etc/passwd file. This is why the user ID should be unique. The UID is used for identifying the user within the system and for determining which system resources the user can access. It is the user’s representation in the Linux kernel. A UID is a number assigned to each Linux user.
