valid usernames
Bill McGonigle
bill at bfccomputing.com
Wed Nov 10 21:09:00 EST 2004
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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