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From: evans@syd.dit.CSIRO.AU (Bruce.Evans)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: pwd.h
Keywords: out-dates ?
Message-ID: <1991May9.003612.24952@syd.dit.CSIRO.AU>
Date: 9 May 91 00:36:12 GMT
References: <610@ultrix.uhasun.hartford.edu>
Organization: CSIRO Division of Info Tech, Sydney, Australia
Lines: 38

In article <610@ultrix.uhasun.hartford.edu> jcook@uhasun.hartford.edu (John Cook) writes:
>Greetings. Recently, I obtained a copy of the VN program that was posted
>...
>"old-fashioned", and terminated compilation. Also, a make error of 236 or
>something was  generated. Apparently, those lines are:
>
>uid_t pw_uid
>gid_t pw_gid

It was not clear if the POSIX standard requires the following program to
work:

----
#include <pwd.h>
main() {}
----

<sys/types.h> has to be included before <pwd.h> to be sure of it working.
vn is an old program and its author did not allow for such brain damage.

It's not difficult to implement <pwd.h> to be independent of <sys/types.h>
but this was not done. As a work-around, I changed <pwd.h> to include
<sys/types.h>. This pollutes the name space but is better than failure to
compile.

The same problem also affects these files:

fcntl.h grp.h signal.h

which traditionally don't need <sys/types.h>. (signal.h only needs it
when _POSIX_SOURCE is defined.)

The problem affects these files to a lesser extent because there is
less tradition:

dirent.h unistd.h utime.h utmp.h
-- 
Bruce Evans		evans@syd.dit.csiro.au