long userids

[Michael Meissner]

In article <70DsV1w163w at wvus.wciu.edu> pete at wvus.wciu.edu (Pete
Gregory) writes:

| Are there any deadly implications to using long (>8 chars) userid names
| in /etc/passwd?  Management wants to inflict an archaic userid convention
| on me (okay with me, as long as UNIX likes it) that will sometimes result in
| user names longer than 8 (sometimes 14) characters long.

My username is 8 characters, and with that, I've noticed quirks over
the years.  Notably, some ls's use a tab after the username, which
make ls -l columns unaligned.  Another problem is that the .rhost
mechanism on older BSD systems won't recognize 8 character names, but
that can be crowbar'ed by using hosts.equiv and living with the looser
security.
--
Michael Meissner	email: meissner at osf.org		phone: 617-621-8861
Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142

Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?