getpw (3)
Leading comments
Copyright 1993 David Metcalfe (david@prism.demon.co.uk) %%%LICENSE_START(VERBATIM) Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Sin...
NAME
getpw - reconstruct password line entrySYNOPSIS
#define _GNU_SOURCE /* See feature_test_macros(7) */ #include <sys/types.h> #include <pwd.h> int getpw(uid_t uid, char *buf);
DESCRIPTION
The getpw() function reconstructs the password line entry for the given user ID uid in the buffer buf. The returned buffer contains a line of format
- name:passwd:uid:gid:gecos:dir:shell
The passwd structure is defined in <pwd.h> as follows:
struct passwd {
char *pw_name; /* username */
char *pw_passwd; /* user password */
uid_t pw_uid; /* user ID */
gid_t pw_gid; /* group ID */
char *pw_gecos; /* user information */
char *pw_dir; /* home directory */
char *pw_shell; /* shell program */
};
For more information about the fields of this structure, see passwd(5).
RETURN VALUE
The getpw() function returns 0 on success; on error, it returns -1, and errno is set to indicate the error.If uid is not found in the password database, getpw() returns -1, sets errno to 0, and leaves buf unchanged.
ERRORS
- 0 or ENOENT
- No user corresponding to uid.
- EINVAL
- buf is NULL.
- ENOMEM
- Insufficient memory to allocate passwd structure.
FILES
- /etc/passwd
- password database file
ATTRIBUTES
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).| Interface | Attribute | Value |
| getpw() | Thread safety | MT-Safe locale |