>I was reading the getpwent(3) man page and there, at the very bottom of the
>page...
>in the middle of the very bottom of the page...
>away from everything ELSE at the very bottom of the page... 
>...read the following words:

Have you been listening to "Alice's Restaurant" lately? ;-)


>COMPATIBILITY
>     The historic function setpwfile(3),  which allowed the specification of
>     alternate password databases, has been deprecated and is no longer avail-
>     able.


>I'm curious as to why setpwfile() was deprecated.  I could sure use this
>routine right about now.
>There's also something that says that it's useless in a networked environment
>and should be avoided.
>Why is this?  How else do you propose to get uid/gid/gecos/etc information?

Think about a distributed network.  What if you're using hesiod for
this information?  Hesiod is basically accessed as a database -- you
request some information on a specific item, and it tells you what
goes along with that item.  There is no way to sequencially scan a
hesiod database remotely (no efficient way, anyway).

How else?  Export it to a db file and do fast lookups on it?

I think you face similar problems if you're using NIS...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Michael L. VanLoon                                 michaelv@HeadCandy.com
        --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
    NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
        Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
    NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...

   Roll your own Internet access -- Seattle People's Internet cooperative.
                  If you're in the Seattle area, ask me how.
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