system users with dot in the name

[Tommy Reynolds]

Uttered Douglas Furlong <douglas.furlong at firebox.com>, spake thus:

> 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.

The chown form "name.group" is now deprecated.  The preferred form is
now "name:group".

I believe this change is part of the move to UTF-8 compliance but
that's a dim recollection.