[4845] in testers
IRIX getlogin() bug
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert A Basch)
Tue Jun 19 17:48:36 2001
Message-Id: <200106192148.RAA17271@anhedonia.mit.edu>
To: testers@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 17:48:31 -0400
From: Robert A Basch <rbasch@MIT.EDU>
While trying to run sawfish-capplet manually on IRIX, I stumbled into
a disturbing bug. When I tried running it from a certain gnome-terminal
window, it displayed a message saying that sawfish was not running.
A process trace revealed that it was trying (and failing) to connect
to the socket in /tmp/.sawfish-rbasch, even though I was logged in as
systest; in building the socket file path, sawfish calls getlogin() to
get the user name (falling back to using getpwuid(...)). I examined
the utmp file, and found a DEAD_PROCESS entry for rbasch on the same
tty line.
So, getlogin() on IRIX is finding the first utmp entry for the controlling
tty, not ignoring DEAD_PROCESS entries. I did a search at the SGI support
site, and found that the problem has already been reported, but has been
classified as a request for enhancement (!), with apparently no plans
to fix it. In a fit of masochism (and likely futility), I've opened
up a support case to pursue it further with SGI.
Bob
