tags 323851 fixed-upstream
thanks
Gruesse Bernhard,
> The getpwnam.3 manpages may confuse people to believe the pw_dir entry
> is the proper way to get the home directory of the current process,
> not reading the referenced passwd(5) stating:
>
> The home directory field provides the name of the initial working
> directory. Login uses this information to set the value of the HOME
> environmental variable.
>
> The (hopefully) attached patch hopefully clarifies this.
Thanks for your report. I rewrote the text somewhat to be as
follows:
The 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 envi-
ronment 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 getpwuid(getuid())->pw_dir) since this allows
the user to modify their notion of "the home direc-
tory" during a login session. To determine the (ini-
tial) home directory of another user, it is necessary
to use getpwnam("username")->pw_dir or similar.
This text will appear in man-pages-2.08.
Cheers,
Michael
--
Michael Kerrisk
maintainer of Linux man pages Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7
Want to help with man page maintenance? Grab the latest
tarball at ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/linux-local/manpages/
and grep the source files for 'FIXME'.
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