home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!gatech!rpi!usc!news.service.uci.edu!unogate!mvb.saic.com!macro32
- From: Chris Petroff <CHRIS@aardvark.ucs.uoknor.edu>
- Newsgroups: vmsnet.internals
- Subject: Re: Finding a users disk name
- Message-ID: <8564176@MVB.SAIC.COM>
- Date: Fri, 9 Oct 92 10:05 CDT
- Organization: Macro32<==>Vmsnet.Internals Gateway
- X-Gateway-Source-Info: Mailing List
- Lines: 34
-
- > Hello, I'm helping a friend of mine write a program that kinda simulates
- > a unix-type operating system. What we are having trouble with is the
- > cd ~user command. We don't know how to get the person's disk area name
- > from their username. We'd like to be able to do cd ~user and have the
- > program give us back disk$xxx:[user]. Is there an easy way to do this,
- > and a way to do it without having operator privileges. Oh, we are using
- > VMS version 5.5
-
- What we do here for nonpriv access to low-level SYSUAF info is use the
- LIST command from AUTHORIZE to gererate a file with basic info, and then
- place it in a world readable spot with appropriate access privs so that
- anyone can use it. A simple SEARCH on this file will return not only
- the home directory/device of a user, but also his UIC, Personal Name,
- privs (NORMAL/ALL), base priority and Account name. After we make the
- SYSUAF.LIS file, we strip out some stuff and leave only the username,
- owner/personal name, UIC, and Directory. We have a command file which
- does this for us which we run after adding/deleting accounts. We also
- have several utilities which are driven off this file...
-
- This allows nonprivilaged access to the info, but the real benifit at
- the time it was implimented (on a 11/780) was that we did not keep
- trashing SUSUAF.DAT everytime we wanted to look someone up! On a
- 6320 (what we have now) it's still more efficient but probably not so
- big a deal....
-
- This may seem like a bothersome way of doing it, but it is VERY simple
- and easy to maintain. Also, it is not likely to break with the next
- version of VMS, but if it does, it is real simple to fix!
-
- Just my $.02
-
- :-)
-
- Chris
-