How can I get an account ID from a username on Mac OS X?

Question

I'm using MacFUSE to create a cool filesystem. I'd like to set the NSFileOwnerAccountID and NSFileGroupOwnerAccountID attributes for the files on it, but the underlying framework I use only gives me user names.

How can I get an account ID from an account name under Mac OS X using Cocoa or other built-in frameworks?

Answer 1

What you could do is get a list of all the CSIdentity objects and build a "username to identity" map. Once you have the identity object, you can get a bunch of other information from it.

More info:

• Identity Services Programming Guide

Answer 2

These are just UID and GID numbers. Try the getpwnam (for user) and getgrnam (for group) functions; each returns a structure that contains the ID number, among other things.

Alternatively, just use NSFileOwnerAccountName and NSFileGroupOwnerAccountName instead of the …AccountID versions.