Ubuntu
pam package

~/.pam_environment and variable values with spaces

Asked by Andrey Bondarenko on 2011-05-28

I'm trying to define a variable in ~/.pam_environment. A value of the variable should contain a space. I've found rather strange behaviour:

Add into ~/.pam_environment following lines:

MYVAR0=some_variable
MYVAR1=some variable
MYVAR2='some variable'
MYVAR3="some variable"
MYVAR4=some\ variable

Open a new login session on a vt and check environment:

$ env | grep MYVAR
MYVAR0=some_variable

As you can see, out of 5 variables MYVAR[0-4] only the first one was defined. I cannot find description of .pam_environment syntax neither in pam_env nor pam_enf.conf manpages. May be I missed something. For me looks like a bug.

I'm using pam_env.so installeb by libpam-modules version 1.1.2-2ubuntu8 from Kubuntu Natty.

Question information

Language:: English Edit question

Status:: Open

For:: Ubuntu pam Edit question

Assignee:: No assignee Edit question

Last query:: 2011-06-06

Last reply:

Revision history for this message

Andrey Bondarenko (abone) said on 2011-05-31:

Found the cause. As of version pam-1.1.2-3ubuntu8.2 user_envfile is read as conffile which has different syntax.

modules/pam_env/pam_env.c:796
retval = _parse_config_file(pamh, envpath);

Very misleading because pam_env manpage states:

/etc/environment
Default environment file

$HOME/.pam_environment
User specific environment file

This sounds for me like /etc/environment and ~/.pam_environment should have the same syntax, but in fact they don't. Still can't decide if it is documentation or implementation bug.

Revision history for this message

Andrey Bondarenko (abone) said on 2011-06-06:

Forwarded the question upstream: https://fedorahosted.org/pipermail/pam-developers/2011-June/000075.html.