On 2026-02-10 19:21:06 -0500, Thomas Dickey wrote: > On Wed, Feb 11, 2026 at 01:13:05AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > I don't know how this works, but I'm wondering why you mentioned > > authentication. The only thing that should be used concerning the > > user is the PID of the process. > > man pam: > > pam - Pluggable Authentication Modules Library > > ... > > DESCRIPTION > PAM is a system of libraries that handle the authentication tasks of > applications (services) on the system. The library provides a stable > general interface (Application Programming Interface - API) that > privilege granting programs (such as login(1) and su(1)) defer to to > perform standard authentication tasks. > > I'd suppose PAM wants more than a process-id, > and am asking how you suppose that could be accomplished.
I would have thought that there may be contexts where authentication is not needed (e.g. because the user has already authentified themselves at a higher level). But I really don't know how PAM works. -- Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
