Re: invoke tilde expansion on quoted string

[Linda Walsh]

Eric Blake wrote:
> Even if your system allows shell metacharacters in usernames, tilde
> expansion does not.
----

I never  thought of that -- I seemed like there should be a
getxxxx command that access the appropriate library by using
your systems's configuration.  Unfortunately, it looks like
it might be SuSE only, though you could grab the latest source
for it -- it's in their glibc-2.17 package, so the source
for that would be:
http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/src-oss/suse/src/glibc-2.17-10.2.src.rpm

I've seen similar utils for nis/yp, but not one that was
"general" to work with glib which uses the OS's preferred lookup
methods.



It does handle metacharacters (spaces, '$' and '\' tested):

> getent passwd 'Domain Administrator'
Domain Administrator:x:500:18:Domain Admin accnt:/home/root:/bin/bash
> getent passwd 'NtDom$'
NtDom$:x:50505:516:S-1-5-21-33333-77777-33333:/var/lib/nobody:/bin/nologin
> getent passwd 'NtDom\root'
NtDom\root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash

---
Certainly is another place where NUL terminated strings would be
useful for holding any returned value.