how to change a UID

[henriksonj]

Hello,

I'm in the process of moving an application from an old HP server to a new one. After transferring most of the settings i've discovered that there is a new system process, sfmdb, that has been assigned the same user ID (103) as a process we use in our application to control file importing.

What's the best way to go about changing the UID of one or the other of these "users:? Thanks so much!

John H.

[Dennis Handly · Accepted solution]

How many of your users are <= 1023?

You'll need to get new unused numbers.  Then do a find -exec chown to change the ownership of all of the files owned by those users.

A good starting place would be the current home directories and search & change each.  You may not care about searching elsewhere?

If you have only one user:

find / -name old-user-name -exec chown new-user-name {} +

If you have many, you should do the massive search once:

find / \( -name old-user-name1 -o -name old-user-name2 ... \) -exec ll -d {} + > file_list.out

Then write a script to do chown on each user's files in file_list.out

Do you use ACLs for these users?