Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 16:36:50 -0800 (PST) From: John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: UIDs greater than 65535? Message-ID: <XFMail.990219163650.jdp@polstra.com> In-Reply-To: <199902200027.RAA14243@usr02.primenet.com>
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Terry Lambert wrote:
>> Can anybody think of a reason why UIDs > 65535 wouldn't work under
>> FreeBSD? They seem to work, and I can't find any reason why they
>> shouldn't. Even the NFS protocol (though not necessarily all NFS
>> servers) seems to be able to accomodate 4-byte UIDs.
>
> 65536 in an unsigned short is -1 is "nobody".
Actually, nobody is 65534 on FreeBSD systems. But anyway, I've only
found a couple of places where UIDs are stored in unsigned shorts:
* In the API to the System V message functions, in <sys/ipc.h>.
* In Linux programs run under emulation.
There are also some limits in archive files, because UIDs are encoded
as (*gag*) 5-digit decimal numbers.
These problems are all avoidable in the application I have in mind.
John
---
John Polstra jdp@polstra.com
John D. Polstra & Co., Inc. Seattle, Washington USA
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
-- H. L. Mencken
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