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From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Re: whoami
Message-ID: <9425@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 30 Aug 89 17:44:49 GMT
References: <1989Aug30.023006.25440@i88.isc.com>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 25

In article <1989Aug30.023006.25440@i88.isc.com> fvd@i88.isc.com (Falgun V. Dave) writes:
>Problem found with "whoami" command for SYS V.

>When the login id is 8 characters long and if 
>that person does "whoami" - nothing is responded 
>and "whoami" slintly returns the prompt.

>If login id is less than 8 characters than there 
>is no problem.

>Has anybody encountered this problem ?
>What is the possible solution ?

I assume you mean "who am i" - my SysV machines don't have whoami.  This
has been the case for at least SysVr2.0 ->3.2.  I reported it a long time
ago.  One possible workaround (the one I used..) is to use the environment
variable LOGNAME instead, although that is less secure.  Or just make all
your login id's less than 8 characters long.
A related problem with the longer names is that mail to names which match
the 1st 8 characters of a login name is accepted and stored even though
the name differs past the 8th character.  For example, if you have
"longname" as a login id, mail to "longname5" will land in /usr/mail/longname5
instead of being rejected.

Les Mikesell