Re: [suse-security] Re: User with dots ? Why not in yast2

* Lars Vaessen [2002-05-05 16:49 +0200]:

First one. 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 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. Not to mention that a trivial c program or awk script could probably be used to insulate this problem on systems that do exhibit this behavior. Disclaimer: I don't like using "." seps in legitimate, system usernames, but for mailusers it is something that is sometimes desirable IMO.