pg_slythe

[James William Pye]

On Fri, May 12, 2006 at 12:42:31PM -0700, Adrian Klaver wrote:
> BUGS
>        Unfortunately,  it  is  often  rather  easy to fool getlogin().  
> Sometimes it does not work at all, because some program messed up the utmp 
> file. Often, it gives only the first 8 characters of the login name. The user 
> currently logged in on the controlling tty of our program need not be the
> user who started it.  Avoid getlogin() for security-related purposes.
> 
>        Note  that  glibc does not follow the POSIX spec and uses stdin instead 
> of /dev/tty.  A bug. (Other recent systems, like SunOS 5.8 and HPUX 11.11
> and FreeBSD 4.8 all return the login name also when stdin is redirected.)
> 
>        Nobody knows precisely what cuserid() does - avoid it in portable 
> programs - avoid it altogether - use getpwuid(geteuid()) instead,  if  that  
> is what you meant.  DO NOT USE cuserid().
> 
> This one of the places I got the alternate method of determining username.

Ah. I think I'll stop using getlogin altogether then... Well, I just found
getpass module, so I think that will use instead of checking the environment. It
appears to be the portable way of doing things(works on windows, at least).