Re: getpwnam

[Bob Proulx]

Bruce Korb wrote:
> Attached is my effort to get getpwnam to use the coreutils
> infrastructure.  These are the hand edited files:

[I posted this to the list before so apologies to those who saw it
previously.  But not getting an answer I will be more persistent.  :-)]

How would this relate to the existing 'getent' from glibc?  There  
appears to be a lot of overlap.  But getent seems to be more general.

  getent passwd bob
  bob:x:1000:1000:Bob Proulx,,,:/home/bob:/bin/bash

  getent aliases root
  root:     bob

  getent hosts 127.0.0.1
  127.0.0.1       torment.proulx.com torment localhost

  getent services ssh
  ssh                   22/tcp

Of course other systems like HP-UX don't have glibc and also don't
have 'getent' either because of this.  Personally I would rather see
getent in coreutils so that it would be available on all of the
platforms that coreutils is available.  And of course a getpwnam in
coreutils would be nice for similar reasons.

Note that I am not opposed to adding something like this to
coreutils.  I just want to know why we are adding it when the
functionality already exists and is widely available.

Bob