C news fast stdio fails regression test on 386/ix.

[Chris Lewis]

In article <1990Aug12.211727.17535 at turnkey.tcc.com> jackv at turnkey.TCC.COM (Jack F. Vogel) writes:

> Right setuid(geteuid()) just plain will not work, it doesn't work on AIX
> either, in fact I suspect the majority of systems will not.

Before trying this mechanism, I recommend checking your manuals.  AIX 3
(RS/6000) even has the "setr[ug]id()" calls, but they're dummies that ALWAYS
return failure (confuses Perl Configure somewhat).  "setuid(geteuid())"
will NEVER work on systems that reflect SVR5.3 setuid() semantics (eg:
SVID compliant systems).  The semantics are roughly (if effective ain't
root):
    - you can only setuid(getruid()), OR
    - setuid(saved_uid); Which has the effect of changing the effective
      userid to the effective userid of the program.
(eg: you can setuid to the real user, and you can setuid back to the
original set-user-id, but NEITHER will change real id.  C-news wants
to be able to set the real userid)

Worse, in SVR5.2 and previous, there's no saved-group concept (at least
in our 3b1's that is)

> However, there
> is no reason not to use spacefor, it really is a nice feature. It is just
> that it is the most system-dependent aspect to the whole Cnews package.
> It is quite simple to get it to work with ISC. Change line 54 of the script
> to look as follows:
 
> 	df $arg | sed "s/.*://" | awk "BEGIN { nf = 1 ; nr = 1 }

Even simpler, on our 1.0.6 386/ix, saying you have a "xenix" df works
fine without having to muck with source.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis
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