1 .\" Copyright 1993 David Metcalfe (david@prism.demon.co.uk)
3 .\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
4 .\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
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7 .\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
8 .\" manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the
9 .\" entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
10 .\" permission notice identical to this one.
12 .\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this
13 .\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no
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15 .\" the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not
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17 .\" which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working
20 .\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by
21 .\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work.
23 .\" References consulted:
24 .\" Linux libc source code
25 .\" Lewine's _POSIX Programmer's Guide_ (O'Reilly & Associates, 1991)
27 .\" Modified Sat Jul 24 19:23:25 1993 by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu)
28 .\" Modified Mon May 27 21:37:47 1996 by Martin Schulze (joey@linux.de)
30 .TH GETPW 3 1996-05-27 "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
32 getpw \- Re-construct password line entry
35 .B #include <sys/types.h>
38 .BI "int getpw(uid_t " uid ", char *" buf );
41 The \fBgetpw\fP() function re-constructs the password line entry for
42 the given user ID \fIuid\fP in the buffer \fIbuf\fP. The returned
43 buffer contains a line of format
46 .B name:passwd:uid:gid:gecos:dir:shell
49 The \fIpasswd\fP structure is defined in \fI<pwd.h>\fP as follows:
54 char *pw_name; /* user name */
55 char *pw_passwd; /* user password */
56 uid_t pw_uid; /* user ID */
57 gid_t pw_gid; /* group ID */
58 char *pw_gecos; /* real name */
59 char *pw_dir; /* home directory */
60 char *pw_shell; /* shell program */
65 The \fBgetpw\fP() function returns 0 on success, or \-1 if an error
70 Insufficient memory to allocate passwd structure.
74 password database file
80 function is dangerous as it may overflow the provided buffer