getprpwuid weird???

[Charlie123]

Hi Gurus,
I have a program calling these:
.............
uid = getuid();
getprpwuid(uid);
.............
when I run it after I logged in, getpwpwuid retuned OK. But if I put this program in the last field of /etc/passwd entry, I used the same account to log in, getprpwuid returns NULL.

Any help?
Thanks a lot.
Charlie

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I suspect the problem is that your process does not have permission to access the tcb database. What is the effective UID of the process?

[Charlie123]

Thanks. the effective process UID is the same as the UID of the user to attempt to log in.
while getprpwuid gave NULL, the errrno was some times 0, sometimes 2.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You will not be able to retrieve anything from the tcb database unless the effective UID of the process is zero.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

As a regular user, the only way that you will be able to use getprpwuid() is to make your program a setuid root program which means you will have to do an explicit setuid(0) inside your program AND the setuid bit (04000) must be set on the executable AND the executable must be owned by root.