lwilson@umabco.UUCP (Lowell G. Wilson) (05/30/89)
A friend of mine called and asked me if there was any reason why an adminsitrator should stay away from special characters when creating user accounts. Specifically, he wants to create some account names which begin with a special character so that these particular accounts will show up first when the names are run through a sort. The accounts are only being used to forward mail. He has run some limited tests to see if there are any problems and so far he's encountered none. Any thoughts? Pitfalls he should be aware of? If you'd rather not post your response, I will be glad to forward e-mail to my friend. Or you can mail to him directly at "...cvl!umlaw2!ggrabow". Thanks for any help you can offer... -- Lowell Wilson : Sinecure III University of Maryland at Baltimore Information Resources Mgt Division UUCP: ...cvl!umabco!lwilson
dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi) (05/31/89)
In article <317@umabco.UUCP> lwilson@umabco.UUCP (Lowell G. Wilson) writes: >...any reason why an >adminsitrator should stay away from special characters when creating >user accounts. 1. If network mail is sent to or from such an account, then most special characters will confuse mail software. Rumor has it that some mail software doesn't like dots in usernames either, even though these are supposed to be legal. 2. RCS doesn't like leading digits in usernames. You may come across other programs that make overly restrictive assumptions about usernames. 3. If you are using the ~user syntax to make csh find somebody's home directory, a special character in the username will cause incorrect parsing. (I didn't try this with ksh, but the same problem will likely occur.) -- Rahul Dhesi <dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> UUCP: ...!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi Career change search is on -- ask me for my resume