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weberc2
Asked: 2012-02-24 06:14:24 +0800 CST

How to find Mac OSX UID from Ubuntu

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How do you view Mac OSX user id without having to boot into OSX? I can mount the drive, but I can't find the UID for my user, which would hopefully enable me to access files without being root.

mount users macosx

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I found my answer here. This is the UID that's tied to the user account.

    According to this article, the user information can be found in this file

    /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/{user-name}.plist

    I verified and the UID was at the bottom of the file, in my case. There's also some business about a generateduid, but that's not what you want, so ignore that.

    And to check ownership of the home folder, I used stat /media/OSX/Users/someone.

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  2. Your non-sensitive user information is stored in the /etc/passwd file on your Mac OS just as in other *nix systems. (This information is confirmed by this link). So you could use the following steps to retrieve the UID of a user.

    • Mount your Mac OS partition. In that look for a file called passwd in the etc folder of your Mac. In other words, open the /etc/passwd file of your Mac OS.
    • Scroll and find your username

    • The third number in the line corresponding to your username should be the UID of that user. For example, my username is nits and my UID is 1000 and my GID is 1000 too

      nits:x:1000:1000:nits,,,:/home/nits:/bin/bash

    For more information on the /etc/password file, look into this blog post on *nixCraft

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