Quick question about valid username characters

Michael Kearey mutk at iprimus.com.au
Tue Feb 17 22:39:41 UTC 2004


Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am Di, den 17.02.2004 schrieb Michael Kearey um 09:39:
> 
>>Hi There,
>>
>>I have several multi-user machines running Redhat 8.0. There are 
>>hundreds of usernames on these machines that have mixture of upper and 
>>lowercase.

>>Why the change?
> 
> 
> I can not confirm that it was a change as I never used uppercase
> letters, but I can say it was ever a good idea to use just lowercase
> letters and no special signs. For problems with Sendmail using uppercase
> letters in usernames see
> 
> http://www.sendmail.org/faq/section4.html#4.17

I can confirm there was a change. Several redhat 8.0 boxes I have 
allow hundreds of uppercase characters usernames. My Fedora box 
doesn't. Therefore a change happened *somewhere*. Hence why I want to 
see a changelog that anounces it...

I still cannot find a reference in any documentation that specifies 
the valid characters for userID's. (Plain old Unix like usernames I mean).

I have to take the problem on the chin, I guess. The process of moving 
users across and translating their usernames etc to all lower case is 
the simple part. The big problem will be in comunicating the changed 
usernames to hundreds of users...

Many thanks,
Michael





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