/bin/login undocumented features

Dan Watts dwatts at ki.UUCP
Tue Apr 23 03:36:10 AEST 1991


I've been trying to get /bin/login to set the environment variable
REMOTEUSER from my deamon process and haven't had too much luck.  My
daemon works similar to telnetd/rlogind in how it invokes /bin/login.

On BSD based systems, there are two undocumented switches:

  -h xxxx	Specify remote host
  -p		Preserve environment when invoking login session

The "-h xxx" option sets the REMOTEHOST environment variable.  From
experimenting, it appears that the "-p" option isn't supported on SGI.
I also noticed that if I invoke /bin/login with a username AND have
REMOTEUSER set in the environment, then the new login session has
REMOTEUSER set.  I found this out by invoking /bin/login with "-p"
which it interpretted as a username.  Unfortunately, I don't know
what the local username is going to be at the point I invoke /bin/login.
One approach would be to write my own frontend to /bin/login to handle
the prompting for the username and then invoke /bin/login.

Perhaps someone from SGI could comment?  How about it SGI?
Could you change /bin/login to always use the REMOTEUSER environment
variable if it's set even when a local username isn't entered on the
/bin/login line?  I'd even settle for a new switch (-u xxxx) to tell
/bin/login.
-- 
################# National Nude Weekend, 13 & 14 July #################
# CompuServe: >INTERNET:uunet.UU.NET!ki.com!dwatts  Dan Watts         #
# UUCP      : ...!{uunet | wgc386}!ki.com!dwatts    Ki Research, Inc. #
################ New Dimensions In Network Connectivity ###############



More information about the Comp.sys.sgi mailing list