Re: Patch proposal for id.c and groups.c to fix afs bug

[Jim Meyering]

Didi <address@hidden> wrote:
> Sorry for any violation of any mailing list rules, this is my first
> patch to coreutils.

Hello!

No violation ;-)
Thanks for the report and patch.

> On some systems, with AFS, if you call 'id' or 'groups' without a user
> name parameter it will return a huge group number:
> $ id -G
> 500 1103556127
>
> The same behavior applies to groups:
> $ groups
> ribalba id: cannot find name for group ID 1103556127
> 1103556127
>
> Because of this I propose following patch :

Unfortunately, we can't use that approach, since
both id and groups have to work even when there isn't
a user or group name (i.e., when getlogin returns NULL).

Maybe you can find a way to distinguish (at run time)
between the regular no-user-or-group-name case and your
AFS nameless-huge-ID case.

...
> The behavior is due to AFS creating a pseudo group in the kernel that
> does not have a name.
>
>
> Some information to the system I am using:
> Linux mypc 2.6.9-67.0.4.EL.cernsmp #1 SMP Mon Feb 4 10:15:50 CET 2008
> x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux