Re: Issues with last Friday's CVS

[Chris B. Vetter]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 11:45:17 +0100
Richard Frith-Macdonald <richard@brainstorm.co.uk> wrote:
[...]
> However, the existing code was fail-safe in that in the event of 
> getpwnam() failing, it uses -2 (which with the normal 16-bit uid/gid
> is set as 65534 ... which is conventionally the uid/gid given to the
> 'nobody' account). In other words ... the actual uid/gid set should
> have been the expected safe one anyway.

  :0> id nobody
  uid=65534(nobody) gid=65534(nobody) groups=65534(nobody)

Yes, per definition / by default, 'nobody' has uid/gid 65534.

However, not everyone is using your box_TM so using -2 as an arbitrary
value to "get the id of user nobody" is wrong. Plain and simple.

  :0> ps -faux | grep gdomap
  4294967294 47897 0.0 0.4 3088 960 ?? Ss 9:45AM 0:00.01 gdomap

'nuff said.

-- 
Chris