On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Lawrence K. Chen, P.Eng. <[email protected]>wrote:

> getty OTOH, handles the user authentication and then exec's (which
> replaces the process memory that its using, with) the login shell.  And,
> luckily there was still enough available for that to work.  Also its
> necessary to use root instead of our individual admin accounts, because
> /bin/sh is only about 20% bigger than getty.  While shells like
> bash/tcsh/zsh are more than 5 times bigger than /bin/sh.  Most of us use
> bash for our admin accounts, one person uses tcsh (though he never
> complained that his account had stopped working, because tcsh wasn't being
> made available anymore...he'd just use root directly), and another has been
> playing around with zsh.
>
> Though not sure how it translates if it was a system with ttymon and more
> than one tty port....
>

PAM session management pretty much requires that the user session be
fork()ed from the root part so that PAM can do administrative cleanup as
root. Although I don't know if older Solaris bothers with that, much like
early Linux PAM didn't and it was impossible to make sure the right things
happened in the right contexts.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
[email protected]                                  [email protected]
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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