Hello fellow nixers,

This thread is about a conversation we had yesterday on IRC.
I was wondering about usernames on Unix.

I'm just gonna post the monologue I had:

Quote:what if when you install a Unix OS you choose the username "daemon" or "games" or "man"
what happens?
what if you named it ":test:" I guess it'll escape the :
because there are : in the password file
ok, it doesn't allow it, it redirects me to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001
http://standards.ieee.org/findstds/stand...-2001.html
"""
adduser: To avoid problems, the username should consist only of
letters, digits, underscores, periods, at signs and dashes, and not start with
a dash (as defined by IEEE Std 1003.1-2001). For compatibility with Samba
machine accounts $ is also supported at the end of the username
"""
there's a --force-badname
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/969...tag_03_431
I tried '_' as username, same story but different message
it said to follow NAME_REGEX[_SYSTEM] and use --force-badname to allow it
"""
adduser: Please enter a username matching the regular expression configured
via the NAME_REGEX[_SYSTEM] configuration variable. Use the `--force-badname'
option to relax this check or reconfigure NAME_REGEX.
"""
nice
/etc/adduser.conf
it's there
NAME_REGEX="^[a-z][-a-z0-9_]*\$"
/etc/login.defs also has a lot of configuration about users
I discussed that when I talked about sharing a system

What do you think?
I couldn't find the answer to the first question and I didn't try yet.