.\" Copyright 1993 David Metcalfe (david@prism.demon.co.uk) .\" .\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this .\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are .\" preserved on all copies. .\" .\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this .\" manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the .\" entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a .\" permission notice identical to this one. .\" .\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this .\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no .\" responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from .\" the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not .\" have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual, .\" which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working .\" professionally. .\" .\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by .\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work. .\" .\" References consulted: .\" Linux libc source code .\" Lewine's "POSIX Programmer's Guide" (O'Reilly & Associates, 1991) .\" 386BSD man pages .\" .\" Modified 1993-07-24 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) .\" Modified 1996-05-27 by Martin Schulze (joey@linux.de) .\" Modified 2003-11-15 by aeb .\" .TH GETPWNAM 3 1996-05-27 "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual" .SH NAME getpwnam, getpwnam_r, getpwuid, getpwuid_r \- get password file entry .SH SYNOPSIS .nf .B #include .B #include .sp .BI "struct passwd *getpwnam(const char *" name ); .sp .BI "struct passwd *getpwuid(uid_t " uid ); .sp .BI "int getpwnam_r(const char *" name ", struct passwd *" pwbuf , .br .BI " char *" buf ", size_t " buflen ", struct passwd **" pwbufp ); .sp .BI "int getpwuid_r(uid_t " uid ", struct passwd *" pwbuf , .br .BI " char *" buf ", size_t " buflen ", struct passwd **" pwbufp ); .fi .SH DESCRIPTION The .BR getpwnam () function returns a pointer to a structure containing the broken-out fields of the record in the password database (e.g., the local password file .IR /etc/passwd , NIS, and LDAP) that matches the user name .IR name . .PP The .BR getpwuid () function returns a pointer to a structure containing the broken-out fields of the record in the password database that matches the user ID .IR uid . .PP The .BR getpwnam_r () and .BR getpwuid_r () functions obtain the same information, but store the retrieved .I passwd structure in the space pointed to by .IR pwbuf . This .I passwd structure contains pointers to strings, and these strings are stored in the buffer .I buf of size .IR buflen . A pointer to the result (in case of success) or NULL (in case no entry was found or an error occurred) is stored in .RI * pwbufp . .PP The \fIpasswd\fP structure is defined in \fI\fP as follows: .sp .RS 0.25i .nf struct passwd { char *pw_name; /* user name */ char *pw_passwd; /* user password */ uid_t pw_uid; /* user ID */ gid_t pw_gid; /* group ID */ char *pw_gecos; /* real name */ char *pw_dir; /* home directory */ char *pw_shell; /* shell program */ }; .fi .RE .PP The maximum needed size for .I buf can be found using .BR sysconf (3) with the _SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX parameter. .SH "RETURN VALUE" The .BR getpwnam () and .BR getpwuid () functions return a pointer to a .I passwd structure, or NULL if the matching entry is not found or an error occurs. If an error occurs, .I errno is set appropriately. If one wants to check .I errno after the call, it should be set to zero before the call. .LP The return value may point to static area, and may be overwritten by subsequent calls to .BR getpwent (3), .BR getpwnam (), or .BR getpwuid (). .LP The .BR getpwnam_r () and .BR getpwuid_r () functions return zero on success. In case of error, an error number is returned. .SH ERRORS .TP .BR 0 " or " ENOENT " or " ESRCH " or " EBADF " or " EPERM " or ... " The given .I name or .I uid was not found. .TP .B EINTR A signal was caught. .TP .B EIO I/O error. .TP .B EMFILE The maximum number (OPEN_MAX) of files was open already in the calling process. .TP .B ENFILE The maximum number of files was open already in the system. .TP .B ENOMEM .\" not in POSIX Insufficient memory to allocate passwd structure. .\" This structure is static, allocated 0 or 1 times. No memory leak. (libc45) .TP .B ERANGE Insufficient buffer space supplied. .SH FILES .TP .I /etc/passwd local password database file .fi .SH "CONFORMING TO" SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001 .SH NOTES The formulation given above under "RETURN VALUE" is from POSIX.1-2001. 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 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 .\" OSF1 4.0g - gives EWOULDBLOCK .\" libc, glibc, Irix 6.5 - give ENOENT .\" 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), .BR getgrnam (3), .BR getpw (3), .BR getpwent (3), .BR putpwent (3), .BR setpwent (3), .BR passwd (5)