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Date:      Fri, 16 Nov 2001 02:08:50 -0800
From:      "Crist J. Clark" <cristjc@earthlink.net>
To:        yura <yura@monkey.sunet.ru>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: su and passwd
Message-ID:  <20011116020850.G9851@blossom.cjclark.org>
In-Reply-To: <200110250858.f9P8wK721582@monkey.sunet.ru>; from yura@monkey.sunet.ru on Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 12:58:20PM %2B0400
References:  <200110250858.f9P8wK721582@monkey.sunet.ru>

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On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 12:58:20PM +0400, yura wrote:
> There is a question.  Why such thing doesn't work:
> (logged on as root)
> $ su - myuser
> $ passwd
> passwd: permission denied
> 
> If someone can answer that, I'd be much grateful.

Because passwd(1) uses getlogin(2) to identify the current user. If
you had really logged in as root (and not su'ed to root), what you did
above is the same as,

  $ passwd root

Which, as we would hope, fails. Doing a,

  $ passwd myuser

Should work fine however.
-- 
Crist J. Clark                     |     cjclark@alum.mit.edu
                                   |     cjclark@jhu.edu
http://people.freebsd.org/~cjc/    |     cjc@freebsd.org

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