Re: HEADSUP: New getent tool to read passwd and group data

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com>]

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For some reason the original mail didn't make it to the list.

I assume this is because the mail body contains raw email addresses.
Can you please filter them out before sending?  Thanks!

On Feb 21 12:47, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: cygwin-apps-owner[...]
> >  On Behalf Of Corinna Vinschen
> > Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2014 14:38
> > To: cygwin-apps[...]
> > 
> > Hi guys,
> > 
> > 
> > I just uploaded the new getent package and sent the announcement,
> > 
> > I'm repeating myself here because this is really important and I'm not sure
> > everybody on this list reads the cygwin and cygwin-announce lists.
> > 
> > In short, we want to get rid of the requirement to maintain /etc/passwd and
> > /etc/group files, per http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2014-02/msg00306.html
> > 
> > In future, tools and scripts, especially service installation helper scripts like
> > my ssh-host-config, must not rely on being able to grep user and group
> > information from /etc/passwd and /etc/group.
> > 
> > Rather, the scripts should be changed to use the getent tool as soon as
> > possible.  Usage for checking passwd:
> > 
> >   $ getent passwd <username...>
> > 
> > I'd like to ask all maintainers providing such scripts, including myself, to look
> > into their packages and fix them to use the getent tool.
> > 
> 
> Corinna,
> 
> For packages such as exim we need to find the uid of System and of Administrator, which the user can set any which way in passwd.
> So we lookup the SID (not the username) to get the uid (or gid).

The SID of the administrator or the SID of the administrors group?
The SID of the local administrator makes only marginal sense to me.
What do you need it for?

> Is there an equivalent mechanism using getent ?
> Else, could Cygwin disregard the passwd entries for these 2 users and use only the fixed values determined by the mapping from Windows? 

You should not have to expect a name change for the SYSTEM and the
Administrators account.  It should be entirely sufficient to check for
the user Administrator and the user SYSTEM or +SYSTEM.  If you really
want to check by SID, feel free to enumerate all accounts by just
omitting the username and scan for the SID you're looking for:

  $ getent passwd | grep ',S-1-5-32-544:'

  $ getent group | grep ':S-1-5-18:'


HTH,
Corinna

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