[3033] in Athena Bugs
Re: 6.3B: su
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ken Raeburn)
Tue Aug 29 10:41:36 1989
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 89 10:41:18 -0400
From: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: Richard Basch <probe@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Richard Basch's message of Tue, 29 Aug 89 06:33:55 -0400,
2) Any attempt at preserving the actual username
by doing this method is useless... a better way
would be to do a getlogin() call which reads the
entry from utmp. Who's to say, I haven't su'd
twice.
Unless you're using an xterm without a utmp entry, or using script.
There *is* no good way to do this.
3) The behavior within the program is inconsistent
between root and other usernames. Why should
"root" be special? In fact, who's to say that
uid 0 is called root. This is just one more
case of hard-coding.
I think "root" is also assumed as the default for "su", isn't it?
4) By removing the test, it becomes possible for
people to base their prompts on $user rather
than having to fork a "whoami" for every
invocation of .cshrc. Currently, there is no
other sure way of insuring that the uid has
not changed except for doing this call.
Um, how about $uid?
