How do I find userid by login (Python under *NIX)

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?

Solution

You might want to have a look at the pwd 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