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When I run whoami it says:

whoami: cannot find name for user id 0

My /etc/passwd file looks like this:

root::0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
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Your /etc/passwd is broken? Can you post the contents – warl0ck Jan 31 at 2:06
What's your id command in current shell when you get whoami?. – Mohsen Pahlevanzadeh Jan 31 at 3:16
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(1) Which linux distribution? (2) What is output of pwck and grpck? (3) Does file /etc/shadow exist? – John Siu Jan 31 at 4:34
If you have ltrace installed, try ltrace whoami. You should see a call to getpwuid() there. – ott-- Jan 31 at 17:09
4  
Also, have you set up (or attempted to) directory services of some sort (LDAP, NIS, etc.)? Have you touched /etc/nsswitch.conf? – derobert Jan 31 at 17:09
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1 Answer

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I would recommend checking the permissions on /etc/passwd and /etc/group. If they're not set to 644 (-rw-r--r--), then run:

chmod 644 /etc/passwd; chmod 644 /etc/group

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still says cannot find name for user id 0 – gabemai Jan 31 at 22:28

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