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13 .\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date.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 2010-10-21 "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
32 getpw \- Re-construct password line entry
35 .BR "#define _GNU_SOURCE" " /* See feature_test_macros(7) */"
36 .B #include <sys/types.h>
39 .BI "int getpw(uid_t " uid ", char *" buf );
44 function reconstructs the password line entry for
45 the given user ID \fIuid\fP in the buffer \fIbuf\fP.
46 The returned buffer contains a line of format
49 .B name:passwd:uid:gid:gecos:dir:shell
52 The \fIpasswd\fP structure is defined in \fI<pwd.h>\fP as follows:
57 char *pw_name; /* username */
58 char *pw_passwd; /* user password */
59 uid_t pw_uid; /* user ID */
60 gid_t pw_gid; /* group ID */
61 char *pw_gecos; /* user information */
62 char *pw_dir; /* home directory */
63 char *pw_shell; /* shell program */
68 For more information about the fields of this structure, see
73 function returns 0 on success; on error, it returns \-1, and
75 is set to indicate the error.
83 No user corresponding to
87 Insufficient memory to allocate
93 password database file
99 function is dangerous as it may overflow the provided buffer