zap@front.se (Svante Lindahl) (12/07/88)
[comp.mail.sendmail added, followups directed back to comp.unix.questions.] [ Previous discussions about characters not too use in the GCOS field: ':' - obviously, this terminates the field ] In article <572@auspex.UUCP>, guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) writes: > The BSD format includes a convention that not all programs necessarily > honor, which means you may not want to use that convention: if the "&" > character appears in the "gecos" field, those programs replace it with > the login name with the first letter capitalized. This means you > probably want to leave out "&" as well. Another character to avoid is '\' if you are using sendmail (ohh noo, not sendmail again :-). If you have that in what the mail user agents considers to be the full name they will pass it on to sendmail, and bad things will happen (non-replyable adresses are bad things!). This is unfortunate, since \ is in one of the six positions that the ANSI-almost-equivalent-to-ASCII reserves for national characters. In the Swedish version of said ANSI-std capital o-umlaut is in this postion, a perfectly valid character in full names around these parts of the world. Unsuspecting sysadms are likely to enter full names with \-s in them. They, or their poor users (with names like \rjan \gvist), are in for a surprise. Svante (...am I glad all my names use regular ASCII letters only :-)