Solaris

I am trying to find the home directory of users on a UNIX (Solaris/AIX) box using

Code:

echo ~username

This does return the home directory for all valid users. For some reason this command also outputs home directory which are non-existent for few users who seem not to have logon access to that server.

For eg. the above command would return below for a non-existent user - /home/username

What I expected was - ~username as the output for a user with no access and that does happen with certain usernames.

This makes me think what could be causing a difference between different users who do not have access to this server. Has this something to do with LDAP?

Nothing I can find in /etc/passwd either.

The ~username does the same as a

Code:

getent passwd username

(then prints the home directory field), or

Code:

perl -e 'printf "%s\n", (getpwnam ("username"))[7]'

The getpwnam() is a function of the libc, and normally acts according to the passwd entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf

Yeah I had tried getent but not sure if Solaris/AIX could get a default home directory from LDAP. How does that work? The reason its not clear is that, it hits a common LDAP and has different behavior for users who are not provided access to the same server(non-existent user). So things are like:

Common LDAP -
--- non-existent user1 - echo ~user1 outputs ~user1
--- non-existent user2 - echo ~user2 - says non-existent user.

An ldap directory used to authenticate users is storing all fields traditionally found in the /etc/passwd plain file. The home directory is definitely one of them but one should only be returned if there is an entry matching the username requested, unless you have a non standard directory server or a custom plugin.
What says:

Code:

ldaplist -v user1

?

Actually ldaplist isn't available. I suspect this to be an implementation issue where in LDAP may have a default home directory specified for certain non-existent users on the server?

---------- Post updated at 03:34 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:28 PM ----------

Its KSH on both AIX/Solaris but it looks to be a problem with the way it was configured. directory? Again I am suspecting this for the reason that certain users when echoed do have a default home directory but has not been granted access to that machine and neither does the home directory exist.

Also I would like to expand on previous post with one more behavior for clarity which I had originally posted in the query:

Common LDAP -
--- non-existent user1 - echo ~user1 outputs ~user1
--- non-existent user2 - echo ~user2 - says non-existent user.
--- non-existent user3 - echo ~user3 outputs /home/user3 .

on the Solaris machine ?? If you have not ldaplist installed, you are unlikely to have any ldap authentication in the first place.
What directory server are you using ?
"non-existent" doesn't seem to appear in ksh error messages. What ksh version are you using ? Is this really the precise error message you get ? on Solaris ? What Solaris release ?

Read the man page of your shell on each OS!
For example

Code:

man bash

under Tilde Expansion
tells that it simply returns the ~user1 if not found.