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. -- rgds Stephen