valid usernames

[Bill McGonigle]

On Nov 10, 2004, at 21:37, Derek Martin wrote:

> As for one
> being prefered, I don't know what makes you say that.  The only
> possible explanation seems to be that the man page sometimes mentions
> both ':' and '.', and other times omits the '.' when refering to the
> separator.

Apparently I was thinking of BSD - e.g.
http://resin.csoft.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=2&topic=chown

"STANDARDS
      Previous versions of the chown utility used the dot (`.') 
character to
      distinguish the group name.  This has been changed to be a colon 
(`:')
      character so that user and group names may contain the dot 
character."

Whether or not using first.last for usernames is a good idea, using the 
dotted form of chown in scripts can still present ambiguity problems 
since a dot is valid in usernames and a colon is not.  So it should 
therefore be avoided, hence non-preferred.

-Bill
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