From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:48:57 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] config --get --path: check for unset $HOME
Message-ID: <AANLkTin6RxdVWW6qYVAyydtncGSxLK_Aoy2aWVIuoptQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100726170837.GC4399@burratino>

On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 17:08, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ęvar Arnfjörš Bjarmason wrote:
>
>> Should we maybe fall back on checking pw_dir in getpwuid() if $HOME isn't set?
>
> Maybe.  Why?  On Unix I suspect it is such a rare case as to not
> justify complicating the rules, but I do not know if it would help on
> other platforms.

I don't know if this is worth it, but in the Perl world this is a
fairly common idiom:

    my $home = $ENV{HOME} || (getpwuid($<))[7];

Sometimes you're executing under some buggy wrapper that's scrubbing
your environment. I recall running into this issue e.g. on some odd
Solaris webserver, which was executing CGI scripts under my user, but
$HOME wasn't set.