pwquality.conf file requires spaces around '='

Tomas Mraz tmraz at redhat.com
Wed Apr 8 08:49:31 UTC 2015


On Út, 2015-04-07 at 16:21 -0400, Brian Mathis wrote:
> The pwquality.conf file requires spaces around the equals sign for config
> options.  The man page claims that this whitespace is "ignored", but it
> does not explicitly say that it is required.  It's very easy to assume it
> is not required, such as when looking at the pam_pwquality man page which
> shows all examples without spaces, so it is not consistent within itself.
> Also, simple config files like this typically don't care, so it's confusing
> as it doesn't seem to follow standard conventions.
> 
> Example:
>     minlen=10     # Not OK
>     minlen = 10   # OK
> 
> Please consider this as a documentation bug if nothing else, otherwise I
> think the config should allow for no spaces around the = in addition to the
> current functionality.

pam_pwquality requires no spaces around the '=' on the module command
line. On the other hand the configuration file example that is installed
into the system contains the spaces around the '=', so the confusion
should not be too big. However I committed a patch to the upstream
repository that makes the minlen=xxx format of the configuration
allowed.

-- 
Tomas Mraz
No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back.
                                              Turkish proverb
(You'll never know whether the road is wrong though.)





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