This library provides simple access to the entries in the /etc/passwd file.

It was made for programs that need to be able to pull home directories, user id's and the like but do not want the cgo-dependence of the core os/user package.

The only real caveat is that it doesn't pull user entries from other sources like PAM or LDAP since it only operates by reading the file on disk.

go get github.com/AstromechZA/etcpwdparse

// load the passwd entries
// err will be non-nill if there was an IO or parsing error while loading the file
cache, err := NewLoadedEtcPasswdCache()
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}

// pull the home directory
// there will be an err if the user could not be found
homedir, err := cache.HomeDirForUsername("bob")

See the documentation at godoc.org/github.com/AstromechZA/etcpwdparse for more information.