How do I find userid by login (Python under *NIX)
Question: I need to set my process to run under 'nobody', I've found os.setuid(), but
how do I find `uid` if I have `login`?

I've found out that uids are in /etc/passwd, but maybe there is a more
pythonic way than scanning /etc/passwd. Anybody?


Answer: You might want to have a look at the
[pwd](http://docs.python.org/library/pwd.html) module in the python stdlib,
for example:

    
    
    import pwd
    pw = pwd.getpwnam("nobody")
    uid = pw.pw_uid
    

it uses /etc/passwd (well, technically it uses the posix C API, so I suppose
it might work on an OS if it didn't use /etc/passwd but exposed the needed
functions) but is cleaner than parsing it manually

