Maximum characters in username

[Matthew Thompson <mattyt@oz.net>]

Hello, everyone,

Ok, here's my silly, newbie-esque question for the week:  how many
characters are allowed in a username?  I'm under the impression that it is
8, but 'adduser' allows you to create users with more characters than
that.

You'd also think that it would be easy to find the answer to this
question, but I've man'd adduser & login, and scoured deja.com and Linux
Unleashed (the Debian mailing list search seems to be not functioning
currently.  I got 'No Matches' no matter what I entered, even 'potato' for
the most recent quarter).  I even re-installed potato in a blank partition
to see if it said anything about how many characters are allowed.  It
doesn't, it just puts you back to the 'Enter Username' field if you enter
a very long name.

TIA for any help :)

Cheers....................

Matthew Thompson       http://mattyt.net
mattyt@oz.net          http://www.oz.net/~mattyt
--Someday, I'll have a web page.--