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Message-ID: <20240523144744.GA10433@brightrain.aerifal.cx>
Date: Thu, 23 May 2024 10:47:44 -0400
From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
To: Leah Neukirchen <leah@...u.org>
Cc: Collin Funk <collin.funk1@...il.com>, musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: getusershell should ignore comments and empty lines.
On Thu, May 23, 2024 at 03:45:10PM +0200, Leah Neukirchen wrote:
> Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org> writes:
>
> > It says:
> >
> > "A hash mark (``#'') indicates the beginning of a comment;
> > subsequent characters up to the end of the line are not
> > interpreted by the routines which search the file."
> >
> > This isn't very clear whether # is only a comment on the beginning of
> > a line (after potential whitespace?) or whether # appearing in a line
> > with a shell pathname is a comment or part of the pathname. If it's a
> > comment, it's not clear if whitespace before it is part of the shell
> > pathname -- e.g. does "/bin/sh # best shell" define "/bin/sh" or
> > "/bin/sh " as the shell pathname?
> >
> > It sounds like nobody ever thought about whitespace, quoting, or
> > rigorous comment syntax here...
>
> True:
>
> OpenBSD drops the rest of the line with "#" and ignores lines not
> starting with a "/".
>
> glibc drops the rest of the line with "#", elides spaces after the
> entry, and skips everything before the first "/" (quite bold).
>
> pam_shells skips all lines that don't start with a "/" and doesn't
> handle "#" specially.
>
> gnome-terminal just tries to find one line that matches exactly the
> the shell
>
> util-linux skips lines from getusershell that start with "#".
> Likewise "seunshare".
In general, musl policy is to support at most what's consistent
between historical implementations.
It seems like they all ignore lines that start with a '#'. They might
(not clear from the above) also ignore blank lines.
The minimal change both to avoid clashing with vaguely reasonable
things user might want to put there (and violating least surprise),
and to support the common behavior, seems to be just looping as long
as the line is empty or starts with #.
Rich
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