[ On Mon, January 6, 1997 at 10:27:33 (+0000), Philip Hazel wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: ampersand in GECOS field
>
> (a) I will look at as many Unixes as I can to see if this "&" usage is
> common, and if it is, I suppose Exim should support it.
I finally checked NetBSD (and presumably all 4.4BSD's), and it's not a
documented feature for them. Perhaps it ended with 4.3 when the new
hashed master.passwd stuff was added?
> (b) In any case, I can add a new expansion variable giving the login
> name of the process that called Exim.
Now that I think about it again, it would be far more elegant to have
the getpw*() routines do the expansion if the feature is to be supported
-- applications should never have to worry about it. After all struct
passwd is just char pointers, so the length is arbitrary.
However I don't think SunOS-4's library does such expansions.... Hang
on, I'll check.... nope -- it appears finger et al do the expansion by
themselves -- an unfortunate and unnecessary complexity.
> (c) Hmm. Why does Exim call it "gecos" rather than "gcos"? Where did I get
> that from, I wonder? I'll check up on that too.
The V7 manuals called it GCOS (and pw_gcos in pwd.h I think), but V10,
SysVr2 and newer, SunOS, 4BSD, etc., all call it GECOS (and pw_gecos in
pwd.h).
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 443-1734 VE3TCP robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@???>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@???>
