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I'm trying to run command lsof |grep services on my Solaris 10 to find any processes that have big files which are using up the disk space but i got a bunch of lines saying:

lsof: no pwd entry for UID 105

I looked at /etc/passwd but there's no user with UID 105 (I think this user was deleted).

What is the lsof line above indicating?

2 Answers 2

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I looked at /etc/passwd but there's no user with UID 105 (I think this user was deleted).

That's what the lsof output is indicating. There's a process running owned by UID 105, but when it tried to lookup the username, there's no entry for that UID in /etc/passwd. Most likely the process was started before the user was deleted, and has been running ever since.

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  • ... or the user created a setuid program somewhere other than his home directory, and somebody ran it.
    – Scott - Слава Україні
    Apr 2, 2015 at 3:45
  • and how can i find the process running by UID 105? I think it's the reason that causes the main problem where df reports 97% disk usage but du only reports half of it.
    – Tom
    Apr 2, 2015 at 13:38
  • @Tom ps -U 105 and ps -u 105 for UID and EUID, respectively
    – Michael Mrozek
    Apr 2, 2015 at 14:33
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    Can also be due to processes running in a container, like docker, that have that UID. The warning can be silenced with the -w option.
    – Tim Bunce
    Nov 10, 2015 at 20:43
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    Oh thanks. Yeah, that was exactly the reasion it was giving this message, the Docker Container users appear to me as "?". Solved it with -w parameter.
    – Raul Chiarella
    Jul 23, 2022 at 18:09
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This message is a warning from lsof that there are one or more processes running under the named UID that have no entry in the user database (typically /etc/passwd). UIDs from 100000 are used typically for LXC container processes, so running these will likely trigger the message.

As it's a warning it can be suppressed with -w (no warnings):

lsof -w [<other args…>]

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