Backport #1068: Ruby Cannot Handle Some UIDs

• Status: Closed
• Assignee: shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)

[JEG2 (James Gray)]

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This shows the main problem:

$ sudo ruby -r etc -e 'n = Etc.getpwnam("nobody"); p n.uid; Process.uid = n.uid'
Password:
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 287) [i686-darwin9.4.0]
4294967294
-e:1:in uid=': bignum too big to convert into long' (RangeError)
from -e:1

The real UID for the nobody user on my system (Mac OS X 10.5.6) is -2. Thus it seems at least some systems use signed UID's and Ruby can't handle that.

The above example is from Ruby 1.8.6. Ruby 1.9 does seem to properly switch users, but it still shows the UID's incorrectly:

$ sudo ruby_dev -v -r etc -e 'n = Etc.getpwnam("nobody"); p n.uid; Process.uid = n.uid; p Process.uid; p Etc.getpwuid(Process.uid)'
ruby 1.9.1 (2008-12-30 patchlevel-0 revision 21203) [i386-darwin9.6.0]
4294967294
4294967294
#<struct Struct::Passwd name="nobody", passwd="*", uid=4294967294, gid=4294967294, gecos="Unprivileged User", dir="/var/empty", shell="/usr/bin/false", change=0, uclass="", expire=0>
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[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

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Hi,

At Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:23:48 +0900,
Ondrej Bilka wrote in [ruby-core:21642]:

Any reason why not handle UID and GID as signed?

Because they are defined as unsigned on that platform.

--
Nobu Nakada

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[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

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Ondrej Bilka wrote:

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 08:53:38AM +0100, Nobuyoshi Nakada wrote:

Hi,

At Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:23:48 +0900,
Ondrej Bilka wrote in [ruby-core:21642]:

Any reason why not handle UID and GID as signed?
Because they are defined as unsigned on that platform.
This can be ignored. It would only display incrorectly UIDs > 2000000000

Out of curiousity, on what basis you can believe that display (and ignore your
header instead)? I'd wather ignore that display and believe what header says
if I had such OS.

=end

[ko1 (Koichi Sasada)]

• Assignee set to shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)
• ruby -v set to ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 287) [i686-darwin9.4.0]

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=end

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Status changed from Open to Assigned

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=end

[shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe)]

• Status changed from Assigned to Closed