GCOS field (Was re: Difference among different UNIX versions)

[Svante Lindahl]

[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 at auspex.UUCP>, guy at 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 :-)