[news.software.b] rn and GETPWENT on BSD systems

muller@sdcc10.ucsd.edu (Keith Muller) (11/10/89)

If you are running on a BSD variant that supports NDBM password
files, then I found a performance improvement by making sure
GETPWENT is defined. (Of course that machine has 1000+ accounts with a
1 MIP CPU.....) With NDBM files, the comment about getpwuid() and
geptwname() being slower than the code in rn to pull apart /etc/passwd
is incorrect.  (The comment in config.h is wrong). I altered the Configure
script to be more careful with BSD systems, but just doing a recompile after
editing config.h to define GETPWENT also works.

I suspect you might want to define GETPWENT on systems running
yellow pages and other systems where not all the password entries reside
in /etc/passwd. With GETPWENT not defined, searches are made directly on
/etc/passwd.

	Keith Muller
	University of California
	muller@ucsd.edu