On 2014-06-17 12:30, Corinna Vinschen wrote: > On Jun 17 12:00, Corinna Vinschen wrote: >> On Jun 16 22:39, Denis Excoffier wrote: >>> Another (unrelated and less important) problem is that 'getent' >>> happily produces lines with some extra ‘:’, in particular when the >>> gecos field itself contains ‘:’. >> >> Wow, that *is* important. All fields returned from the server have to >> get their colons converted to commas. I'll fix that. > > While we're at it... do we really need the gecos info? Cygwin fills > out this field with the Windows username and SID info for internal > purposes, and then adds the gecos info from AD. However, it's just > informational and usually only used by the finger(1) tool. The gecos field from AD seems to be _prepended_ (not appended) to the username + SID. In any case, it may represent some information with high added value (like user real name or e-mail address, depending on local rules of course). I would not vote for removing it.
Why is it so clear that the ‘:’ should be replaced by a comma? Here, we have situations where it contains something like « Owner: Albert Einstein ». An underscore could be more appropriate. There is something more important: i’ve written in one of my previous messages that when ‘:’ occurs in gecos, the resulting ‘passwd’ file under ‘getent’ will contain more ‘:’ than expected, but this is incorrect. In fact (and i would like someone to try it), when ‘:’ is found within the gecos field, ‘getent’ does not show the last (homedir) field, and the count of ‘:’ is still correct. The problem might not be in getent after all. Regards, Denis Excoffier. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
