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Add NOTES text describing relationship of pw_dir and HOME and 

pointing out that applications should preferentially
inspect HOME
This commit is contained in:
Michael Kerrisk 2005-09-21 12:02:23 +00:00
parent 84a0a0510d
commit 6b2fc2945f
1 changed files with 18 additions and 3 deletions
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21
man3/getpwnam.3
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@ -22,7 +22,7 @@
.\"
.\" References consulted:
.\" Linux libc source code
.\" Lewine's _POSIX Programmer's Guide_ (O'Reilly & Associates, 1991)
.\" Lewine's "POSIX Programmer's Guide" (O'Reilly & Associates, 1991)
.\" 386BSD man pages
.\"
.\" Modified 1993-07-24 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu)
@ -165,13 +165,13 @@ local password database file
SVID 3, 4.3BSD, POSIX 1003.1-2003
.SH NOTES
The formulation given above under "RETURN VALUE" is from POSIX 1003.1-2001.
It does not call "not found" an error, hence does not specify what value
It does not call "not found" an error, and hence does not specify what value
.I errno
might have in this situation. But that makes it impossible to recognize
errors. One might argue that according to POSIX
.I errno
should be left unchanged if an entry is not found. Experiments on various
Unix-like systems shows that lots of different values occur in this
Unix-like systems show that lots of different values occur in this
situation: 0, ENOENT, EBADF, ESRCH, EWOULDBLOCK, EPERM and probably others.
.\" more precisely:
.\" AIX 5.1 - gives ESRCH
@ -180,6 +180,21 @@ situation: 0, ENOENT, EBADF, ESRCH, EWOULDBLOCK, EPERM and probably others.
.\" FreeBSD 4.8, OpenBSD 3.2, NetBSD 1.6 - give EPERM
.\" SunOS 5.8 - gives EBADF
.\" Tru64 5.1b, HP-UX-11i, SunOS 5.7 - give 0
The
.I pw_dir
field contains the name of the initial working directory of the user.
Login programs use the value of this field to initialize
the HOME environment variable for the login shell.
An application that wants to determine its user's home directory
should inspect the value of HOME (rather than the value
.IR getpwuid(getuid())->pw_dir )
since this allows the user to modify their notion of
"the home directory" during a login session.
To determine the (initial) home directory of another user,
it is necessary to use
.I getpwnam("username")->pw_dir
or similar.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR endpwent (3),
.BR fgetpwent (3),