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Amusingly, it's also the case on BG/Q compute nodes. Only this morning, I cooked up the following patch:
--- a/Lib/posixpath.py
+++ b/Lib/posixpath.py
@@ -237,7 +237,11 @@ def expanduser(path):
 if i == 1:
 if 'HOME' not in os.environ:
 import pwd
- userhome = pwd.getpwuid(os.getuid()).pw_dir
+ try:
+ userhome = pwd.getpwuid(os.getuid()).pw_dir
+ except KeyError:
+ import warnings
+ warnings.warn('Unable to auto-detect $HOME, export it or functionality such as user-installed modules will not work!', RuntimeWarning)
 else:
 userhome = os.environ['HOME']
 else:
I think it's a bit harsh to fail completely, but returning silently also doesn't sound like a good idea, so I decided to issue a warning instead; the wording should be probably tweaked by a native speaker of English though.
What do you think?