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I cannot work this out. If I'm logged in as root (using chroot - possibly) then all my actions (e.g. mkdir) are assigned to the user root.

For my websites I need to associate files and directories and such to a specific user which appears to be linked to the virtual host account for the hosting account. (Its a dedicated hosting server - we log into the control panel and click "create account". This creates a new dir in /home with a www/public_html dir in it). For instance here is a screenshot of the www folder for one account:

enter image description here

I don't understand what its all about. The user appears to be 2045 however this is a number. Typing id 2045 into the command line results in id: 2045: No such user so does id "2045".

You can chown 2045:sites though, so I'm not entirely sure what's going on. Is 2045 a user? Or something else I don't know about?

What I really want to do is be able to switch user (su) to 2045 and run the commands so that I don't have to chown every time I do something (I work with SVN a lot).

Any insight would be very helpful. :) Thank you.

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

When ls -l shows a number instead of a group/user name, that is a UID/GID (User ID/Group ID). In your case, 2045 is a GID. You can get the user/group names (along with other information) using the following commands:

getent passwd UID
getent group GID


$ getent passwd 1000
andrea:x:1000:1000:Andrea Corbellini,,,:/home/andrea:/bin/bash
$ getent group 1000
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Ah I see, thats cool. So these files and directories are owned by two groups? 2045 and sites? How can I run commands as the group 2045? –  Thomas Clayson Mar 1 '12 at 10:17
No, it's owned by group 2045 and user sites. To run a command as a different group, you can use sudo -g group-name. In this case, as you don't have the group name but its ID, you should use sudo -g "#2045" (remember the quotes!). Note that you can specify both -g and -u at the same time. –  Andrea Corbellini Mar 1 '12 at 18:38
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