orphaned UID

[CTCAdmin]

How does one remove an orphaned UID?

[freddri]

You could just vi the /etc/passwd file and delete it there.

[CTCAdmin]

It's not in the /etc/passwd file.
It's not found with the 'find' command either.

[Alan Riggs]

I think there may be some sonfusion in terminology here. UID generally refers to User ID. But I do not know what an "orphaned" User IP might be. Perhaps if you describe the symptoms you are seeing in some detail it might help.

[Greta Blamire]

Probably this is an orphan process, do a ps -ef and get the number listed under pid. Then think if stopping it will hurt anything, such as your data. If it's safe to stop then type: kill -9 and the number. I have to put a reboot in my cron schedule every night to do this, my ERP leaves so many orphans behind.

[Sanjay Tailor]

Hi,
I think the gentleman maybe referring to an orphaned process. Maybe DEFUNCT? I think this happens when a parent process dies and its child is still wating to be serviced by its parent. You can use a kill -9 on this PID to get rid of it. But only after you make sure nothing else will be affected by it.

Good Luck

[John_Hancock]

Could it be that files once owned by a user who has been removed reom the passwd file have reverted to display the numeric UID since the user name no longer exists.

To display all the files use find / -user UID.

To change the ownership of these to a known user and group use;

find / -user -exec chown newuser:newgroup {} ;

John

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

It is not orphaned proces, neither orphaned UID... its is orphaned files ( i think).

to find all orphaned files do:

find / - nouser.

find / -noser -exec whatyouwanttodo {} ;
or better
find / -nouser | xargs whatyouwanttodo


See find ma page.