Sorry Cygwinners,
currently I'm having massive problems posting to the Cygwin list. I
don't even get rejection mails, my posts simply don't make it :-(
My first try was back on 2015-12-21, several more have followed since
then.
Happy New Year to all of you :-)
Rainer
------------------ My original post from 2015-12-21: -------------------
Sam,
On Sunday, 2015-12-20 11:41:16 +0000, you wrote:
> ...
> > and (of all things!) contain blanks,
>
> * rant mode on *
>
> What's wrong with blanks?
Actually nothing. I myself am using plenty of blanks, for instance when
writing e-mails. But you seem to have totally missed my point. I was
NOT talking about blanks in path names but about blanks in user and
group names. And there they DO have a tendency to spoil parsing the
output from commands like "ls -l", "id", "ps", and probably many more.
Consider you have users "A" and "A B" as well as groups "B C" and "C",
and then go and correctly parse
-rwxr-xr-x 1 A B C 0 2015-12-21 13:18 example
keeping in mind that "ls" does not provide null-terminated user and
group names in its output.
Unix simply wasn't designed for blanks in these places, even though it
is liberal enough to allow you to put your foot in your mouth, if you
want to. However, I prefer the good old Unix paradigm of keeping simple
things simple, which means in the case at hand of keeping user and group
names blank free.
Corinna wanted to know why someone would use own "passwd" and "group"
files, and I explained why I'm using them and what kind of changes I in-
troduced there. Your milage may vary.
@Corinna:
Meanwhile I tested "cygwin1-20151216.dll". The good news: no more seg-
mentation faults when running "ls -l /C". The bad news: While "Unknown+
User" is still translated to "other" via my last line in "/etc/passwd",
the corresponding line in file "/etc/group" no longer seems to have any
effect. Whenever the group is not determinable, "Unknown+Group" is now
displayed.
And since you hinted that this "other:*:" trick only worked by happen-
stance, I'm now having an item on my Cygwin Christmas wish list:
A way to configure strings different from "Unknown+User", "Unknown+
Group", "CurrentSession", and "OtherSession" in one of the files
"/etc/passwd", "/etc/group", or "/etc/nsswitch.conf" or even in env-
ironment variable "CYGWIN".
Apart from that I'm considering my original problem solved.
Thanks Corinna, and Happy Holidays :-)
Sincerely,
Rainer
----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Rainer M Woitok | Phone : (+49 60 93) 487 95 95 |
| Kolpingstraße 3 | Mobile: (+49 172) 813 6 831 |
| D-63846 Laufach | Mail : rainer.woi...@gmail.com |
| Germany | |
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