bin/30424: Generalization of vipw(8) to lock pwdb while being edited by a script

[Alan Batie]

The following reply was made to PR bin/30424; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Alan Batie <alan at batie.org>
To: Jilles Tjoelker <jilles at stack.nl>
Cc: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: bin/30424: Generalization of vipw(8) to lock pwdb while being
 edited by a script
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:39:30 -0700

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 On 7/29/10 4:50 PM, Jilles Tjoelker wrote:
 > Is there any reason you need a special option in vipw(8) to run (in
 > effect) a different editor, when temporarily changing the EDITOR
 > environment variable would do the same?
 >=20
 > Also, the pw(8) utility may be useful, allowing various modifications t=
 o
 > the passwd database more easily.
 
 Those would have been (and, yes, were available) useful alternatives 9
 years ago ;-)
 
 The EDITOR hack makes me nervous for gettings args and stdin to the
 script, though I'm pretty sure they would work; pw is probably the
 "right" solution to the problem I was solving, though it's inefficient:
 I was (actually, still am --- that script is still in use) reading in
 the password file, making several updates to it in memory, then writing
 it back out.  We're talking numbers you can count on fingers and toes
 though, so efficiency really isn't a factor in this case, though it's
 conceivable.  Well, I'm not sure an application where it would be a
 factor *is* conceivable, and any setup that large would probably be
 using a db backend of some sort, but still, that's the sort of operation
 where pw_lock is useful, and it's trivial to support.
 
 
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