Go (golang), file uid on windows

Question

Is it possible to get a file's UID (owner) on Windows? I tried to use FileInfo.Sys(), but it only works on Linux. I'm really stumped on this one and can't figure out how to get the UID.

Answer 1

The first problem is that file systems native to Windows which supports file/directory ownership do not have the concept of "owner UID" simply because Windows users have no UIDs either.

The security of the Windows NT line or kernels is implemented using the so-called "access control lists" (ACLs), and security principals (such as users) are identified using the so-called "security identifiers" (SIDs). A SID is a variable-length multi-field data structure usually passed around as a byte array.

Another complication is that a file on an ACL-enabled Windows file system might have no owner at all (and no ACL attached to it as well); this is rare but possible.

So... If the part of explanation stating "there's no such thing as the entry owner's UID on Windows filesystem" is OK for you, this is all there is to it.

If not, and you actually wanted to ask "how do I get security information for an entry on a Windows filesystem?", the question gets more complicated. AFAIK the stock standard library shipped with Go does not have the necessary wrappers around the relevant bits of the Win32 API. So to implement this, you'll need to either wrap them yourself (it's not that hard, after all) or try to find a helper package.