Some of the functions in the dklibs library return built-in
default values or values obtained from environment variables if
they fail to obtain some information from system functions.
This is intended for application development, if an application is
not fully configured it should do best possible recovery and
attempt to run.
For SUID/SGID programs, daemons or services this might be dangerous, these programs should not guess configuration settings, they should print an error message to remind the user or administrator to complete the configuration and exit.
So there are functions you should not use at all in such
programs.
For other functions you should check whether or not they can be
used on the current system before processing information returned
by these functions.
For
you should use dksf_have_getpid() ... to check whether the functions return useful information.