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Re: Getting the User/Owner of another process

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On Tuesday, Sep 30, 2003, at 12:41 US/Eastern, John Farmer wrote:

It is a driver for a network card. Here is the scenario:

The system starts up and during startup the Startup Item runs code to get
the driver setup. One part of this is that the Startup Item grabs the last
used information from some preference plists and sends that information down
to the driver.

Now here is my conundrum: I can't have just one set of preference plists
because one of our requirements is that each user must have their own
preferences. I can't have just one set of preference plists for all users
because of security considerations (such as file permissions), on the OS.

The problem that I see with that is that network settings are inherently system-wide. If you change any settings that affect how the machine connects to the Internet, you will affect *all* users logged into the system, not just the one logged into the GUI. What if they don't log into the GUI, but instead log in to the command line? what if you have 5 people all logged in at the same time? etc.


So I have to have each individual user have their own preferences (located
in /Users/%username%/Library/Preferences/). Because of this when the
Startup Item runs it has to get the preferences into the driver sometime
during or right after login so the user can start the internet or access the
network. When the Startup Item calls NSUserName() (which according to the
documentation and I quote: "Returns the logon name of the current user."),

It's doing just what it says it will. The "logon name of the current user" is "root".

returns root (the owner of the process), not the logon name of the current
user. When I run NSHomeDirectory it gives me the roots home directory, this
doesn't help me because I need the current User Name to get the path for the
preferences.

"root" *is* the current user.


Note I do not need to load the preferences before login (as Eric pointed
out), I can wait until right after login, but the fact still remains when I
need to get the path for preferences like say:
/Users/johnfarmer/Library/Preferences/... I need to get the user name for
John Farmer so I can create the path to access the user's plist. I can
however get the user name from the Preference Pane, but I can't have the
user opening the Preference Pane everytime they login just to startup the
network.

Long story short: I need to get a user name during or after the login
process so that I can get the user name of the currently logged in user so I
can load the preferences of the logged in user to access the network.

You can write a small application that gets added to the user's login items that simply takes note of the current user, and forwards that data to your driver. But again, do this at your own risk, if any network card driver on my machine worked in the user-specific way you describe, I'd delete it, and go return the card for a refund.


- -- Clark S. Cox III
email@hidden
http://homepage.mac.com/clarkcox3/blog/B1196589870/index.html
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 >Re: Getting the User/Owner of another process (From: "John Farmer" <email@hidden>)



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