On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 01:56:40AM +0200, Brandon Peirce wrote:

> BTW, I'm interested to know if you could suggest a practical use for
> multiple users with the same uid.

I guess you could have different /etc/passwd entries with the same uid
but different shells and/or home directories.  If you had stroppy
users who needed to share an account and *insisted* on their own
choice of shell and environment it might be a less energetic
alternative to LART-ing them.  (The smart solution would be to make
them different uids in a common group, but let's suppose that's
impossible because, ... erm, they have to use a service which is tied
to a single uid because of, ... erm, ... erm, ... /me flips a card
from the BOFH excuses file, ... SOLAR FLARES.  Damn those flares!)

> And what are the semantics? Who owns the files they create?

Surely they all do, since once they are logged in they are the same
uid and their files belong to that uid.

> Is the output of `ls -l' well defined

Goodness knows.  It wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't.  I'm sure it
would be independent of who created the file for the same reason
above, the kernel only knows the uid.  (Second thoughts, an extended
file system could store the login name as metadata and a
metadata-aware ls could report it, but how would that metadata get
into the file system?  Could the file system driver read the user's
environment and record its $USER?  Hmmmm...)

(I'm itching to check some of this out but I have to go to work.  More
later.)

Regards, 

Jeremy Henty
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