How can I find my User ID (UID) from terminal?

Question

The title says it all. What command I need to run from a terminal to find my user ID (UID)?

score 471 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 05 '22 at 17:17

471

There are a couple of ways:

Using the id command you can get the real and effective user and group IDs.
```
 id -u <username>
```
If no username is supplied to id, it will default to the current user.
Using the shell variable. (It is not an environment variable, and thus is not available in env).
```
 echo $UID
```

edited Jan 05 '22 at 17:17

guntbert

answered May 17 '14 at 13:21

jobin

9

How about GID ? – kangear Oct 29 '15 at 01:11
26

@kangear id -g – itsazzad Dec 18 '15 at 15:23
It's worth noting that, due to the fact that the variables are resolved before being passed to a command, we have that sudo echo ${UID} prints out 1000 (or whatever your sudoer user's UID is), whereas sudo id -u prints out 0. – adentinger Dec 19 '18 at 20:33
The username is optional, defaulting to yourself. Maybe square brackets would be better for indicating this, instead of angle brackets. – mwfearnley May 13 '19 at 15:44
3

The second part of this answer is wrong. The variable in question is explicitly not an environment variable. It's a shell variable. Big difference. You can see this with echo $UID versus env|grep ^UID in Bash, for example. This means in particular that the first method is more robust and the second will only work in shell scripts, not - say - in something like Python (python -c 'import os; print(os.environ)' to see the environment). – 0xC0000022L Dec 16 '20 at 15:39
@0xC0000022L That seems to be the case indeed. I get 1000 from echo $UID and an empty line from $ printenv UID. – Daniel Dec 05 '23 at 11:22

score 112 · Answer 2 · answered May 17 '14 at 13:20

112

Simply try

id

This will return your user ID, group ID, and all your groups.

answered May 17 '14 at 13:20

TAq

16

or id -u to see just the UID – steeldriver May 17 '14 at 13:21
Yepp. Prefer Jobin's answer, if you need to avoid parsing the output. – TAq May 17 '14 at 13:25
6

so much easier with id -u and id -g. Thanks. :) – thoroc Aug 03 '17 at 17:00

score 19 · Answer 3 · answered May 17 '14 at 13:28

19

Try also :

getent passwd username

This will display user id , group id and home directory .

Or:

grep username /etc/passwd

answered May 17 '14 at 13:28

nux

why to try long or alternative command while echo $UID and id -u is simple and exact according to question? – Pandya May 17 '14 at 13:37
7

thats right , but its good to know all options – nux May 17 '14 at 13:38

score 10 · Answer 4 · answered May 17 '14 at 13:23

10

You can use id command.

answered May 17 '14 at 13:23

Diego Lopez

Gabriel Staples · Answer 5 · 2023-09-12T22:20:03.537

5

id -u  # user ID (UID)
id -g  # group ID (GID)

Example run and output for the active user (myself):

$ id -u
1000
$ id -g
1000

and for the root user (via sudo):

$ sudo id -u
[sudo] password for gabriel: 
0
$ sudo id -g
0

Note that the first user is generally 1000 for both the UID and GID, and the root user is generally 0 for both the UID and GID.

edited Sep 12 '23 at 22:20

answered Jun 15 '23 at 05:53

Gabriel Staples

5 Answers5