long userids

[Eric Peterson]

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.

I ran into this problem just yesterday on a System V machine.  I found
that with a long user ID, I was unable to change my password with
/bin/passwd.  I was unable to use FTP, since somewhere, either in the
client or the server, my ID was being truncated to 8 characters.

| * I've conducted a test with three long user names (1st 12 chars identical),
|     and the system seems to be able to differentiate them okay (including
| 	who owns files).

That's because ownership is determined by user ID number, not the
login name.

| * everyone will have to use 'n' option with 'ls', so that duplicate ownership
|     will not be suspected.

Good luck enforcing this, other than by hacking ls and possibly
breaking any scripts or other software that depends upon the lack of
the -n option.

Why does your management want to support such long ID names,
especially ones of varying length?  Perhaps it's something similar to
what we do here at Encore ...

Someone decided that it would be nice to be able to send mail to
anyone in the company by merely sending mail to an address consisting
of their first initial followed by their complete last name.  To do
this, the file /usr/lib/aliases maps everyone's first initial and full
last name into a real user ID at a real machine location.  Some people
have IDs that fit this pattern, truncated to 8 characters.  Others
have only their first name or their initials.  But the aliases file
takes care of all of these special cases.

This may not be what your superiors want necessarily.  But there
should be some way to accomodate their needs without resorting to long
user IDs.

Eric
--
       Eric Peterson <> epeterson at encore.com <> uunet!encore!epeterson
   Encore Computer Corp. * Ft. Lauderdale, Florida * (305) 587-2900 x 5208
Why did Constantinople get the works? Gung'f abobql'f ohfvarff ohg gur Ghexf.