You're right - it doesn't have to be a dot. But my position >is: there is no technical nor a logical reason that tells me not to use a >dot. By the way, there might be situations where a dot in a username >would be helpful: If your organisation already has accounts and login names that >contain dots on other systems (often seen on Win32-based environments). For >these users, it would be kind of comfortable to use the same account name on >a Linux system, too.
That´s the point. I´m a ISP Admin and my users love creating usernames (for e-mails) with dots. It´s a kind of tradition. Thomas help with the alias problem in Qmail and I had already known that we can manually edit "/etc/passwd". But these are "manual" solutions, not a really good solution. At my point of view I agree with Emmerich, if the kernel doens´t care about it, Why the 'userland' programs don´t do the same? I´m going to check the useradd source code right now. Thank you. -- ========================= José Mário Viana ISP Network Admin SecrelNet ISP - Brazil =========================