On Feb 14 10:02, Dave Kilroy wrote:
> On 13/02/2014 21:48, David Stacey wrote:
> >On 13/02/2014 19:36, m0viefreak wrote:
> >>Grepping through /bin I found at least one other package
> >>that makes use of /etc/passwd as a file directly (cvsbug), but
> >>since I don't have everything installed I can only assume there
> >>are more cygwin-packages and other programs someone might build
> >>from source.
> >
> >My complete install is proving quite useful this week:
> >
> >    chere
> >    xhere
> >
> >All of these reference /etc/passwd; some of the above also use
> >/etc/group.
> chere (with the -s passwd) reads etc/passwd and starts the default
> shell of the current user from the explorer context menu. For now, I
> will expect users wanting this functionality to keep
> using/etc/passwd. If we grow a mechanism where the login shell can
> be queried easily, I'll update chere to use that.

Indeed.  After the discussion yesterday I already realized that we will
need some commandline tool to request passwd and group entries.

There is a function called getpw on Linux which allows to fetch a passwd
entry in the form it has in /etc/passwd:

  http://linux.die.net/man/3/getpw

But I can't find any tool which actually utilizes the function.  There's
also no group equivalent.

Does anybody know an existing CLI tool with the whole purpose of
requesting user or group information?

In the next few weeks I will change mkpasswd/mkgroup to create passwd
and group entries which are equivalent to the entires created by Cygwin
itself.  So, if we don't find any tool, maybe we can utilize the
`mkpasswd -u' or `mkgroup -g' options at least.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat