User accounts

[Rahul Dhesi]

In article <317 at umabco.UUCP> lwilson at 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 at bsu-cs.bsu.edu>
UUCP:    ...!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi
Career change search is on -- ask me for my resume