Hello,
are there any best practices for the length of user names?
I tend to limit them to 8 characters and to follow the pattern 'first letter of the first name'+'first 7 letters of the last name' (e.g. mbaudier).
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...
I would be very interested to hear opinions / experience about this. (I'm using CentOS 5.5)
Thanks in advance!
Mathieu
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Mathieu Baudier mbaudier@argeo.org wrote:
Hello,
are there any best practices for the length of user names?
I tend to limit them to 8 characters and to follow the pattern 'first letter of the first name'+'first 7 letters of the last name' (e.g. mbaudier).
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...
I would be very interested to hear opinions / experience about this. (I'm using CentOS 5.5)
Thanks in advance!
Mathieu _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Never had problems with username lengths. Haven't really made any measurements but I had quite long names i.e. username@some-long-mail-domain.com without any problems.
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.
On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 07:54:10AM -0800, Benjamin Franz wrote:
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 are some minor side effects.
For example, from "man ps" If the length of the username is greater than the length of the display column, the numeric user ID is displayed instead.
On my 5.5 machine I have: haldaemon:x:68:68:HAL daemon:/:/sbin/nologin and yet % ps aux | grep -w hald | grep -v root 68 4389 0.0 0.1 6680 4640 ? Ss Oct24 0:06 hald 68 4397 0.0 0.0 2108 828 ? S Oct24 0:00 hald-addon-acpi: listening on acpid socket /var/run/acpid.socket 68 4401 0.0 0.0 2108 828 ? S Oct24 0:00 hald-addon-keyboard: listening on /dev/input/event0
Excluding minor artifacts like this, long user names work just fine.
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Benjamin Franz -
Lucian -
Mathieu Baudier -
Stephen Harris