long userids

[Leslie Mikesell]

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

SysV (as of r3 anyway) mail will deliver anything that matches 8 characters
of a passwd file entry to a file name using up to 14 characters of the
recipient name.  This means that if you have a user "longname1", mail
to "longname9" will be accepted with no errors even though no one
will be able to retreive it.  I think I even had to make a small change
to Smail3 to get this right.

"Who am I" will fail (SysVr3 again) on long user names but can usually be
replaced by $LOGNAME in scripts.

Les Mikesell
  les at chinet.chi.il.us