Becky has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I've been given a perl program that a colleague runs perfectly well on unix. It says it's fine to run on windows but I get the following error:

The getpwnam function is unimplemented

I've done a bit of searching and it seems that getpwnam isn't implemented with ActivePerl.

Another website said that the equivalent of getpwnam on windows is NetUserGetInfo(). Is this correct or is there a way I can get getpwnam?

Thanks!

Edit by tye, title, some P tags

  • Comment on The getpwnam function is unimplemented (in Windows)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: getpwnam
by JamesNC (Chaplain) on Jan 19, 2004 at 18:29 UTC
    Try:
    use Win32;

my $userName = Win32::LoginName();
print "Current User: ", $userName, "\n";

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
      Good one...I tried this and it worked like a charm !!! Thanks !!!
[reply]
Re: getpwnam
by derby (Abbot) on Jan 19, 2004 at 18:45 UTC
    It's hard to say what the correct way is. getpwnam returns the password structure (and that's different things on different *Nixes but basically user name, user id, group id, encrypted password, real name, home directory, and shell). Exactly what do you need for your script?

    -derby

[reply]
      The only place it's called is in the following subroutine: 

      sub map_user_group
{
    if( ! defined( $uid ) ){
        if( $user =~ /^\d+$/ ){
            # User is just a number - presume it is the uid
            $uid = $user;
        }
        else {
            $uid = (getpwnam( $user ))[ 2 ];
        }
    }
    if( ! defined( $gid ) ){
        if( $group =~ /\d+$/ ){
            # Group is just a number - presume it is the gid
            $gid = $group;
        }
        else {
            $gid = (getgrnam( $group ))[ 2 ];
        }
    }
}

      [download]

      Any ideas would be much appreciated!

[reply]
[d/l]
        that snippet of code sets the userid and groupid ... concepts that are foreign to a lot of windows systems. It's not so much that ActivePerl doesn't implement getpwnam (and getgrnam) but that there's no need for it on a windows platform. Exactly what is the script doing with $uid and $gid?

        -derby

[reply]
Re: getpwnam
by jweed (Chaplain) on Jan 19, 2004 at 18:20 UTC
[reply]

      I'm afraid that that isn't going to help being, as it says on the tin, a " by-name interface to Perl's built-in getpw*() functions".

      I think making a wrapper round some Win32::* modules method so it has the same interface as getpwnam() will be the way to go.

      /J\

[reply]
Re: The getpwnam function is unimplemented (in Windows)
by ysth (Canon) on Jan 20, 2004 at 00:32 UTC
[reply]

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