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Re: allowing dots in user names



* Steinar H. Gunderson:

> On Sat, Nov 27, 2004 at 02:38:32PM +0100, Marc Haber wrote:
>> Is there any valid reason why I should refrain from doing so?
>
> I guess many people still use "chown foo.bar" (instead of chown foo:bar),
> which will probably get confused by dots in "foo".

Fortunately, parse_user_spec in recent corutils versions seems to do
the right thing:

/* Extract from NAME, which has the form "[user][:.][group]",
   a USERNAME, UID U, GROUPNAME, and GID G.
   Either user or group, or both, must be present.
   If the group is omitted but the ":" separator is given,
   use the given user's login group.
   If SPEC_ARG contains a `:', then use that as the separator, ignoring
   any `.'s.  If there is no `:', but there is a `.', then first look
   up the entire SPEC_ARG as a login name.  If that look-up fails, then
   try again interpreting the `.'  as a separator.



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