ansaurus

Question

Answer 1

+7 A:

To look up my userid (bagnew) under Unix:

import pwd
pw = pwd.getpwnam("bagnew")
uid = pw.pw_uid

See the pwd module info for more.

Brian Agnew 2010-03-29 18:57:47

It will raise `KeyError` if the username is not found.

Joe Koberg 2010-03-29 18:59:16

@Joe - thanks for the clarification

Brian Agnew 2010-03-29 19:00:00

Found some more info here: http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/pwd/

Elifarley 2010-03-30 18:38:55

Answer 2

+1 A:

I would parse /etc/passwd for the username in question. Users may not necessarily have homedir's.

Bill Sanders 2010-03-29 19:43:21

This will fail if e.g. LDAP is being used.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams 2010-03-29 21:15:44

+1 for mentioning that users may not necessarily have homedirs.

Andrei Ciobanu 2010-03-29 21:19:41

I was under the impression that not all linux flavours store user info in the /etc/passwd file...

Powertieke 2010-03-29 21:28:49

@Powertieke: They do, if the `passwd` or `shadow` NSS databases are using `files`. See the `nsswitch.conf(5)` man page for more details.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams 2010-03-29 21:32:34

Answer 3

A:

Using pwd you can get a listing of all available user entries using pwd.getpwall(). This can work if you do not like try:/except: blocks.

import pwd

userid = "zomobiba"
if userid in [x[0] for x in pwd.getpwall()]:
    print "Yay"

Powertieke 2010-03-29 21:25:00

How can I tell if a given login exists in my Linux box, using Python?