From: Harry Ohlsen <harryo@...>
Date: 2001-11-30T00:14:32+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26909] Fixed ... partly ... maybe a bug?

In article <20011130.014233.786039021.2571@zipworld.com.au>, "Harry
Ohlsen" <harryo@zipworld.com.au> wrote:

> I was very pleased to find that the Etc module provided a getpwnam()
> method to get at a passwd entry.
> 
> However, when I tried to call it, my program hung at that point.  Has
> anyone seen this behaviour before or can someone suggest what might be
> going on ... or how I could go about working that out myself?

OK. I discovered that I needed to do a "require 'etc.so'" and then it
worked fine.

However, I found a couple of problems.  One is that I accidentally sent
it something like "harryo/xyz" and it again hung, even with the necessary
require of "etc.so".  I'm always reluctant to say this, but that feels like a
bug.

Secondly, on my Linux box, the passwords are stored in a shadow password
file (/etc/shadow) and getpwnam() doesn't seem to know about that.

The passwd field in the object it returns contains "x", which is what's
in /etc/passwd to indicate that the password can be found in /etc/shadow.

Maybe the code needs to be changed to understand shadow password files.