Feature #12410: Process.uid= validation and casting

• Status: Rejected
• Assignee: -
• Target version: -

[djberg96 (Daniel Berger)]

OSX 10.11.4
Ruby 2.2.x and 2.3.x

It seems that Ruby added the ability to use a string for Process.uid, which is nice. But, it has introduced inconsistency with regards to enforcement:

> Process.uid = 'bogus' # ArgumentError: can't find user for bogus
> Process.uid = 999999  # Does not raise an error, even though the uid is invalid

Also, it seems there's some sort of casting bug for negative values:

> Process.uid = -1 # -1
> Process.uid      # 0
> Process.uid = -2 # -2
> Process.uid      # 4294967294

While this is almost certainly an issue with the underlying C function (somewhat concerning), I think we should validate the values passed to Process.uid= (and similar methods) the same way we validate it for the string. Presumably a simple getpwuid check would work.

[djberg96 (Daniel Berger)]

• ruby -v set to ruby 2.3.1p112 (2016-04-26 revision 54768) [x86_64-darwin15]

[mirakui (Issei Naruta)]

Wrote a patch for this ticket: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/1568
It validates the argument for Process#.uid= using getpwuid.

[sorah (Sorah Fukumori)]

• Tracker changed from Bug to Feature

Changing this ticket into a feature request because this request wants adding a new behavior into a existing method.

[naruse (Yui NARUSE)]

• Status changed from Open to Rejected

As follows, it looks because BSD id(1) handles the uid argument as 32bit integer.
(Note that GNU coreutils' id(1) doesn't allow negative argument)

% id -un -- -4294967296
root

Therefore this behavior is considered as unexpected behavior and Ruby shouldn't follow it.