valid usernames

[Bill McGonigle]

On Nov 10, 2004, at 16:13, Charles Farinella wrote:

> We are no longer able to create usernames that contain '.', as in
> charlie.farinella.  I used to do this, but somewhere along the way that
> became a no-no on both RedHat and Slackware.  I'm curious, does anyone
> know why?

I can see where there could be some ambiguity.  For instance, given two 
users:

   charlie
and
   charlie.brown

and the group
   brown

what does
   chown charlie.brown somefile
do?

Now, granted, that's a problem with chown and utilities that accept 
similar syntax, and chown has been changed lately to honor/prefer:

   chown charlie:brown somefile

but until lots of current software and system scripts are updated 
you're going to potentially hit some problems with first.last 
usernames, so the redhat scripts are probably trying to protect you.  
As wei said, there's always vipw.

-Bill
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