Tilde prefix returns invalid home directory

Question

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

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 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 too.

Answer 1

getent and finger commands were outputting a default home directory for a non-existent user (not retrieved using ldaplist) because the requests were handled through an intermediate access control mechanism such as Cisco SA Control for role based access control.