how to find the owner of a file or directory in python
I need a function or method in Python to find the owner of a file or directory.
The function should be like:
>>> find_owner("/home/somedir/somefile")
owner3
Solution 1:
I'm not really much of a python guy, but I was able to whip this up:
from os import stat
from pwd import getpwuid
def find_owner(filename):
return getpwuid(stat(filename).st_uid).pw_name
Solution 2:
You want to use os.stat()
:
os.stat(path)
Perform the equivalent of a stat() system call on the given path.
(This function follows symlinks; to stat a symlink use lstat().)
The return value is an object whose attributes correspond to the
members of the stat structure, namely:
- st_mode - protection bits,
- st_ino - inode number,
- st_dev - device,
- st_nlink - number of hard links,
- st_uid - user id of owner,
- st_gid - group id of owner,
- st_size - size of file, in bytes,
- st_atime - time of most recent access,
- st_mtime - time of most recent content modification,
- st_ctime - platform dependent; time of most recent metadata
change on Unix, or the time of creation on Windows)
Example of usage to get owner UID:
from os import stat
stat(my_filename).st_uid
Note, however, that stat
returns user id number (for example, 0 for root), not actual user name.
Solution 3:
It's an old question, but for those who are looking for a simpler solution with Python 3.
You can also use Path
from pathlib
to solve this problem, by calling the Path
's owner
and group
method like this:
from pathlib import Path
path = Path("/path/to/your/file")
owner = path.owner()
group = path.group()
print(f"{path.name} is owned by {owner}:{group}")
So in this case, the method could be the following:
from typing import Union
from pathlib import Path
def find_owner(path: Union[str, Path]) -> str:
path = Path(path)
return f"{path.owner()}:{path.group()}"
Solution 4:
I stumbled across this recently, looking to get owner user and group information, so I thought I'd share what I came up with:
import os
from pwd import getpwuid
from grp import getgrgid
def get_file_ownership(filename):
return (
getpwuid(os.stat(filename).st_uid).pw_name,
getgrgid(os.stat(filename).st_gid).gr_name
)