🚀 go-pugleaf

> Hello, I'm helping a friend of mine write a program that kinda simulates
> a unix-type operating system. What we are having trouble with is the
> cd ~user  command. We don't know how to get the person's disk area name
> from their username. We'd like to be able to do cd ~user and have the
> program give us back disk$xxx:[user]. Is there an easy way to do this,
> and a way to do it without having operator privileges. Oh, we are using
> VMS version 5.5

What we do here for nonpriv access to low-level SYSUAF info is use the
LIST command from AUTHORIZE to gererate a file with basic info, and then
place it in a world readable spot with appropriate access privs so that
anyone can use it.  A simple SEARCH on this file will return not only
the home directory/device of a user, but also his UIC, Personal Name,
privs (NORMAL/ALL), base priority and Account name.  After we make the
SYSUAF.LIS file, we strip out some stuff and leave only the username,
owner/personal name, UIC, and Directory.  We have a command file which
does this for us which we run after adding/deleting accounts.  We also
have several utilities which are driven off this file...

This allows nonprivilaged access to the info, but the real benifit at
the time it was implimented (on a 11/780) was that we did not keep
trashing SUSUAF.DAT everytime we wanted to look someone up!  On a
6320 (what we have now) it's still more efficient but probably not so
big a deal....

This may seem like a bothersome way of doing it, but it is VERY simple
and easy to maintain.  Also, it is not likely to break with the next
version of VMS, but if it does, it is real simple to fix!

Just my $.02

:-)

Chris