On Fri, 2006-01-06 at 01:37 +0000, James Fidell wrote: > Quoting Aleksandar Milivojevic (alex at milivojevic.org): > > Quoting Robin Mordasiewicz <robin at bullseye.tv>: > > > > > On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Benjamin Smith wrote: > > > > > >> Try this one: > > >> > > >> chown -R c.smith.users /home/c.smith > > >> > > >> See the problem? > > >> > > > what about > > > chown -R c.smith:users /home/c.smith > > > > The ':' is not really an solution because it doesn't really address the > > problem. > > The problem is that the first syntax (using dot) is valid. > > > > Consider you have users "foo" and "foo.bar" and group "bar". What > > will "chown foo.bar file" do? Change the owner of the file to user > > foo.bar or change the owner to foo and group to bar? Yes, you can use > > column instead of dot on command line. However, many scripts still use > > dot (and there is nothing wrong with it, since using dot to separate > > username and group is perfectly valid). > > To argue that "." is disallowed in usernames because it has special > syntactic meaning to "chown" then it may be necessary to explain why "-" > is allowed in filenames when it has special syntactic meaning to many > commands. > I disagree ... not that it matters what I think. If chown and chgrp allow dots to seperate user and group, I don't think they should not be allowed in user names (or at least this should be a major factor to consider). > chown(2) doesn't care about dots in usernames and it would be easy enough > to code chown(1) to allow a dotted username to be escaped, so it's not > really a compelling reason for disallowing them. > > However, where dots have not been allowed in usernames historically, it > may be inadvisible to start allowing them to avoid breaking any code that > implicitly or otherwise assumes that usernames won't contain dots. > BUT, the I think that the real reason that dots should not be allowed in user names is because this doesn't allow dots: RFC 4282 - The Network Access Identifier There is no requirement to follow this for usernames; however, I think we should. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20060105/e7ab4289/attachment-0005.sig>