On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Jan Trippler wrote:
Add a new user without dot and edit the /etc/passwd manually after this. It should work (without warranty).
Because . is not a valid character for users. What about "chown user.group file" ? Does the . belong to the username or is it the username-group delimiter?
Why this? AFAIK your chown syntax isn't standard, it should be: chown user:group file (according to the manual page in 8.0 :-)
uid:gid vs. uid.gid for chown is a dragon to beat on a lot of UNIX flaviours, but Linux uses GNU's chown with POSIX extensions which allows both ;-) They just forgot to mention it in the man-pages (or you need to read the un-written too) Hope this helps to get out of the confusion. Let the questioner decide what to do with chown uid.gid when the username contains a dot. Achim