Re: [CentOS] Best practices for the maximal length of user names

On 11/13/2010 05:25 AM, Mathieu Baudier wrote:

But people are sometimes frustrated with having their last name truncated and I wonder if limiting the user name to 8 characters is not a kind of superstition coming from some old times...

CentOS5 supports 31 characters for user names (I tested it). 8 character limits for user names was a holdover from some truly ancient Unix systems and has been pretty much irrelevant to Linux for more than ten years.

There is no reason I can think of to limit user names in Linux to 8 characters now unless you need to inter-operate account logins with an old Unix box that still has that limit.