[plug] re: User names

[Jon L. Miller]

kinda thought so... thanks

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 7/28/99, at 8:41 AM, Matt Kemner  wrote: 

>On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, Jon L. Miller wrote:
>
>> Yeah, this is what I've done, I was just wondering if there is a rule
>> that states do not use "." in creating user names. 
>
>It's not recommended.
>Even though you could probably get it to work on your system and not see
>any side-effects, chances are down the track you will install some
utility
>(or write a script) that doesn't expect to see a . in a username.
>A good example is the chown command, where you can set the userid and
>groupid of a file at the same time by seperating them by a .
>eg. "chown root.admin /etc/*" which sets the ownership of all files in
>/etc/ to root, and group of admin.
>
>Other symbols can cause other problems. The only characters I allow for
>usernames are a-z 0-9 "_" and "-".
>I modified adduser so it contains:
>
>my $validchars="[a-z0-9_-]";
>if ($user !~ /^$validchars+$/) {
>        print "Invalid character in username\n";
>        exit;
>}
>
>So nobody can make the mistake.
>
>If people want email addresses with symbols in them, I add an alias for
>them in /etc/aliases, as was suggested in several earlier posts.
>
> - Matt

Jon L. Miller, MCNE ASE
MMT Networks Pty Ltd
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