On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 16:50, Stefan Wollny wrote: > Hi misc@-readers! > > I have once more read man afterboot(8) and a question came up related > to the superuser's password. > > In section 'root password' advisory is given to "choose a password > that has digits and special characters (not space)". This last advice > is what I do not understand - all of my passwords have spaces, > including root's, and I never noticed any drawbacks. Actually I > consider spaces within a password to be a security feature making it a > 'passphrase' which should be harder to crack (yes - it is as looong > password for root ;-) ) > > Now: Is this advice in afterboot(8) 'out-of-date' or am I just lucky?
I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work. I might stay away from control characters and unicode because you may have keyboard / byte sequence translation issues, but space should be reliable enough. The only place I can think spaces would be a problem is command line arguments, which 1) affects other characters as well 2) is a bad idea.
