GNU bug report logs - #76876
logname output is often wrong when linked with glibc

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From: Nicolas Boos <nicolas.boos <at> wanadoo.fr>
To: 76876 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Cc: Bruno Haible <bruno <at> clisp.org>
Subject: bug#76876: logname output is often wrong when linked with glibc
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 07:42:50 +0100

Bruno, thank you for all these clarifications.


Regarding cases such as "su --login" and users who share the same uid,
it might be interesting to add a few lines to the logname documentation.

It's still very confusing to have $LOGNAME with one value and the output
of logname with another.

NB

> Nicolas Boos wrote:
> > This page says that the result of the logname command and the LOGNAME
> > variable must be the same:
> > https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/aix/7.3?topic=l-logname-command
> 
> An AIX man page is not a specification for what we run on GNU systems.
> 
> > Thus, getlogin() implementations that use the LOGNAME or login_name
> > variables such as musl, uclibc or even gnulib WIN32 seems fine.
> 
> getlogin() is used for security and auditing purposes, for example,
> for recording who has made important system changes as 'root'.
> 
> The problem with getenv("LOGNAME") is that it is arbitrarily fakeable.
> For some uses, this may be fine. For other uses, it is not. And it's
> for the latter that POSIX specified the getlogin() function that
> accesses system-internal data structures that are not fakeable.
> (If every use-case was happy with getenv("LOGNAME"), there would be
> no need for a getlogin() function in POSIX.)
> 
> > Anyway, using a UID to get a login name like glibc's getlogin() function
> > does, we sometimes get incorrect results.
> > 
> > Here is a third test case, allowed by posix:
> > $ cat /etc/passwd
> > nicolas:x:1000:2001::/home/nicolas:/bin/bash
> > claude:x:1000:2002::/home/claude:/bin/zsh
> > 
> > localhost login: claude
> > Password:
> > $ echo $LOGNAME
> > claude
> > $ logname (glibc)
> > nicolas
> > $ logname (musl)
> > claude
> > $ logname (uclibc)
> > claude
> 
> Yes, POSIX [1] says "If getlogin() returns a non-null pointer, then that
> pointer points to the name that the user logged in under, even if there
> are several login names with the same user ID." This can be implemented
> on systems like FreeBSD, where the kernel keeps track of the user name
> as a string. But on Linux,
>   - The kernel keeps track only of the uid, which - as you noted - can
>     be associated with several user names,
>   - The database which associates ttys with login *names* is utmp, which
>     on musl libc does not exist (see this definition in <utmp.h>:
>     #define _PATH_UTMP "/dev/null/utmp"  ).
>   - Even on systems which have /var/run/utmp, often the pseudo-ttys
>     (allocated by terminal emulators) have no entry in /var/run/utmp;
>     thus finding the "seat" of the screen on which a terminal emulator
>     is running is hard.
> 
> Thus, on Linux systems, a correct implementation of getlogin() can not
> distinguish different users with the same uid (with reasonable effort).
> This applies to both glibc and the new code in gnulib.
> 
> Bruno
> 
> [1] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/functions/getlogin.html
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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