system users with dot in the name

Douglas Furlong douglas.furlong at firebox.com
Fri May 14 11:38:11 UTC 2004


On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 12:29, Nicolas wrote:
> Hi to all,
> i would like to create users with dot in the name.. for example mydomain.com
> adduser doesn't permit this but it permitted in the redhat8.. How can i do
> this?

I have accomplished this by using LDAP as the backend for the
authentication module.

However I have read some suggest "."'s in the name may be a very bad
thing. One example was the chown command, on some systems you could have
a user named John, and Group name Smith, and another user John.Smith.

You could type chown john:smith, to change the ownership of a file to
user John, and group Smith.
However, on some systems you can also type chown john.smith, which
should do the same as above (the period being the delimiter), however of
course if you have periods in the name, you run in to problems.

As far as I am aware I have hit no problems using the LDAP backend and
user names with .'s in the name. it's also possible to get Cyrus to work
with this (using "unixhierarchysep: yes" in the conf file).

May i ask why you want .'s in the name? If your looking for email
accounts with .'s in the name, it may be worth while thinking about
setting up aliases in the /etc/aliases file for each use (troublesome
possibly).

Hope that helps.

Doug





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