Length of User names

[der Mouse]

In article <1991Jun05.235228.4667 at chinet.chi.il.us>, les at chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
> In article <3614 at litchi.bbn.com> rsalz at bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes:
[an attribution line seems to have been lost here]
>>> consider those applications that attempt to get usernames and
>>> provide only 8+1 characters of storage for them
>> Such programs are fairly badly written since the header file has
>> warned about using "8" for some time and you can safely get the
>> maximum allowable size by using sizeof.
> Well, you can consider SysVr3's /bin/mail to be fairly badly written,
> then.

Fine.

> If you use login names >8 characters, mail that matches the first 8
> characters of a login name is accepted and up to 14 characters of the
> mail address is used for the filename in /usr/mail.

Okay, so it's broken.  So what?  A good reason to use something else
instead, something to which you have source.

Just because brokenness is in a widespread program doesn't make it any
less broken.

					der Mouse

			old: mcgill-vision!mouse
			new: mouse at larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu