Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven!decuac!bacchus.pa.dec.com!decvax.dec.com!zinn!ubbs-nh!siia!drd
From: drd@siia.mv.com (David Dick)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: loginid vs. uid.
Message-ID: <1990Jul16.215316.9592@siia.mv.com>
Date: 16 Jul 90 21:53:16 GMT
References: <316@dynasys.UUCP>
Organization: Software Innovations, Inc.
Lines: 32

In <316@dynasys.UUCP> jessea@dynasys.UUCP (Jesse W. Asher) writes:

>I have learned to make a distinction between a loginid and the userid.
>The loginid is the actual name of your login.  For example:  jessea.
>The userid is the actual number, your uid.  For example:  110.

>I consider these two separate concepts - one is a name and the other a
>number and they are not interchangeable.

>My question is does anyone else view them this way, and if not what is
>the relationship?

I view loginid as just a name that login and some other programs use
as a symbol for uid.  At our company we often have more than one login
to get to the same uid, usually with something different, like shell
or home directory.

This leads to another point of security philosophy: login vs. mail ids.
I think it is quite silly to have the symbol that someone uses to login
be the same as the symbol that other people use to send mail to that
person.  I think the password file should be set up so that the ids used
by ps(1), ls(1), and other programs that print user ids in fact has
password entries that can't be used to login (e.g., "NoLogin").
Those programs find the first entries for the respective user ids in 
/etc/passwd.  Subsequent entries for the user ids can contain the
actual names used to login; these won't be seen by ps(1), etc.

The setup for keeping separate mail ids could be handled by 
a mail alias file, or something else, depending on the mailer.

David Dick
Software Innovations, Inc. [the Software Moving Company (sm)]