On Wed, Jul 20, 2005 at 02:10:46PM +0200, Moritz Grimm wrote: > Even though the chown(8) man page states that the colon needs to be the > separator between user and group, the period (still(?), maybe for > historical/POSIXish reasons?) can function as the separator as well. > This means that under certain (pretty rare) conditions, e.g. if the > administrator forgot that foo.bar has been removed earlier (wrt the > example above), chown does something that wasn't intended instead of > printing the error that user "foo.bar" does not exist. > > Assumed that this is the only place where '.' is dangerous in usernames, > the proper solution would probably be to compile chown in > /usr/src/bin/chmod with SUPPORT_DOT as undefined and to remove the > is-dangerous warning from all other places, like chsh ... and be > prepared to redirect lots of confused users to the manpage. > > Alternatively, you could make it a policy to not user periods in > usernames on your system(s) or live with the effect that they can have > and simply be aware of them. > > Whether making useradd and adduser complain is a good idea or not, I do > not know. Maybe it's even okay to just remove the warning from chsh in > any case, since it doesn't appear to be the appropriate tool to issue > such a warning. > > Moritz
Indeed. IMHO, either the man pages should be altered, or the chown program, so that it understands no '.', but just the ':'. -- Thanos Tsouanas .: My Music: http://www.thanostsouanas.com/ http://thanos.sians.org/ .: Sians Music: http://www.sians.org/
