> I cant use an editor to mass update and change usernames as this is a part of an automatic useradd routine > written in an ancient legacy application which calls useradd and usermod, we have been using this software for more than 15 years, so its hard for me to argue for a rewrite, so im forced to bend the OS instead > > it isnt a problem on redhat 8.0, so somewhere in the patches for shadow utils. there must be a change to this behaviour.. > up until now i have created the useradds with lower case and manually converted them to upper case > > I am aware that it is a no no to use upper case usernames, but we have been doing it for years without problems so... Have you considered replacing useradd and usermod with a wrapper script? Barry