Repository navigation
os.userInfo().shell is '' if no shell in /etc/passwd #15684
Description
- Version: master
- Platform: Linux (Ubuntu 14.04)
- Subsystem: os
Continuation of libuv/libuv#1570
Basically this line fails:
Line 196 in 4843c2f
because os.userInfo().shell is ''. This is because os.userInfo() calls uv__getpwuid_r() which calls getpwuid_r(3), which reads the relevant line from /etc/passwd:
gib:x:1234:3210:Gibson Fahnestock:/home/gib:
However the user shell on this machine is not defined in /etc/passwd, so we get a default.
The question is whether we should just update the test (remove this check, so don't actually check that os.userInfo().shell actually returns anything, or whether os.userInfo().shell should handle this case.
I guess it comes down to whether this function's purpose is just "read the shell from /etc/passwd", or "tell you which shell the user is using". If it's the former we remove the test, if it's the latter we should check either the default shell, or process.env.SHELL.
The default shell is either just defaulting to /bin/sh, or it's coming from /etc/adduser.conf:
# The DSHELL variable specifies the default login shell on your system
DSHELL=/bin/bash
Activity
cjihrig commentedon Sep 29, 2017
A few comments. First, the
os.userInfo()docs state:So, I don't think it would be unreasonable to require that the information be in the password file.
The test could still check that a string is returned. It could even go further and perform the current check if the string has a length > 0.
I'm not saying that we should go this route, but we already do something like this with the user's home directory.
os.userInfo()returns the home directory from the password file, whileos.homedir()takes a few environment variables into account.shellberg commentedon Sep 29, 2017
This is potentially an Ubuntu/Debian behaviour.
At least, the typical Ubuntu user entry, based on (default)
addusercreation, results in an empty shell specified in the/etc/passwdfile (no shell specifically defined). Ubuntu's man page specifies that the agent setting theSHELLenvironment variable islogin; where empty, the value will default to/bin/sh.So, it seems it is possible to have an interactive shell without the export of
SHELLon Ubuntu systems.silverwind commentedon Sep 30, 2017
Unrelated, but that sounds like a bug in
adduserto me.gibfahn commentedon Oct 18, 2017
That makes sense, so if people need something higher level to get the user's default shell we can just add an
os.shell().test: handle blank shells in test-os.js
test: handle blank shells in test-os.js
test: handle blank shells in test-os.js
test: handle blank shells in test-os.js
test: handle blank shells in test-os.js
test: handle blank shells in test-os.js
test: handle blank shells in test-os.js