id tells me "id: 1000: no such user"

Quick question: How can the following invokation of id command fail?
<code>
$ id -n -u 1000
id: 1000: no such user
</code>
<code>
$ id
uid=1000(richter) gid=100(users) groups=100(users)
</code>
Works well on Ubuntu 13.10 and should according to manpage?

All the best,
Kalle

Greetings, and welcome to the forum!

As far as I can tell, your command fails because id wants a username, not a UID. So the command didn't really fail, it told you that there was not a user with the username "1000". The command id with no options is returning the logged in user's information. I don't know why it works in Ubantu. In Suse, entering id -n returns id: cannot print only names or real IDs in default format. Perhaps it was changed in one or the other distro for security reasons or something.

If what you're trying to do is find out the username associated with a known UID, the only way I know is to use Yast>Security and Users>User and Group Management. Or from the command line, look into /etc/passwd using cat or vi or another text editor. Users are at the bottom (of mine, at least). If you have a lot of users, this could be a pain, maybe figure out a script with grep or something.

Hope this helps, and let us know if it did. If it didn't, come on back and we'll keep working on it.

Again, welcome to the group.

 

Hi bozo,
Thanks for your reply. The behavior I expected doesn't correpond to the manpage which I misunderstood and the behavior is also not the one I described on Ubuntu (checked bash_history and saw that I used id command with varitables with wrong content), i.e. id does was it is supposed to do.