* ts [2002-05-05 22:23 +0200]:

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Some implementations of chown expect user and group separated by a dot. If your username was "lars.vaessen", how could an admin of such a system chown you a file? It would go to the different user "lars" and the group "vaessen".

That's simply not true. I just chowned bogus.guy /home/bogus.guy/*.x*, as an experiment and it works as expected.

If you had followed my explanation, you would have come to this: $ touch somefile; ls -ld $_ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 5 21:25 somefile $ useradd lars $ groupadd vaessen $ chown lars.vaessen somefile && ls -ld somefile -rw-r--r-- 1 lars vaessen 0 May 5 21:25 somefile $ rm somefile; touch $_; ls -ld $_ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 5 21:25 somefile $ useradd lars.vaessen $ chown lars.vaessen somefile && ls -ld somefile -rw-r--r-- 1 lars.vae root 0 May 5 21:26 somefile As you can see, the behaviour of chown depends on the contents of your /etc/passwd . So it's impossible to predict what would happen by deriving the commandline. And that's why you really do *not* want to use dots in usernames.

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If previous versions of yast didn't mind dots, they are broken. This is something that needs to be conclusively proven by real world examples of system malfunction arising from this use rather than an aesthetic dislike of the dotted seps.

as proven above.

I don't like using "." seps in legitimate, system usernames, but for mailusers it is something that is sometimes desirable

man 5 aliases Regards, -- Johannes Franken Professional unix/network development mailto:jfranken@jfranken.de http://www.jfranken.de/