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Re: base-files: LOGNAME


On Mon, May 31, 2010 12:22 pm, Andy Koppe wrote:
> On 31 May 2010 09:18, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> On May 30 10:02, Andy Koppe wrote:
>>> On Sunday, May 30, 2010, Yaakov wrote:
>>> > POSIX.1[1] describes a LOGNAME environment variable which represents
>>> the user's login name. ÂAdding the following lines to /etc/profile
>>> should do the trick:
>>> >
>>> > LOGNAME="`logname`"
>>> > export LOGNAME
>>> >
>>> > Where logname(1) is a program supplied by coreutils whose presence is
>>> required by POSIX.1[2].
>>>
>>> That would mean a costly fork() during shell startup. Could this be
>>> set in the DLL instead, as happens with the SHELL variable?
>>
>> Huh? ÂThe Cygwin DLL does not set $SHELL.
>
> You're right of course, it's actually bash that sets it. Seems I
> confused myself quite thoroughly when I looked into this a few weeks
> ago.
>
> Anyway, so we've got USERNAME, USER, and LOGNAME. Does anyone know
> what the differences between those are supposed to be? Apparently
> USERNAME is set automatically on NT systems, so could /etc/profile
> just copy that to USER and LOGNAME instead of invoking 'id' and
> 'logname'?

USERNAME == logname != USER

John     == John    != john

on my system.

/etc/passwd;

john:unused:1001:513:U-Win7\John,S-1-5-21-2757910492-2695755496-4075423505-1001:/home/John:/bin/bash

Does that explain the differences?

> Posix defines LOGNAME, but regarding USER it only says that it is
> "unwise to conflict with certain variables that are frequently
> exported by widely used command interpreters and applications".
> (http://opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xbd/envvar.html)



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