On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 09:41:27PM +0100, Peter Tribble wrote: > On 9/26/07, Nicolas Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Why do you think we limit usernames to 8 characters still? It's because > > of things like ps(1) and ls(1) that like to use fixed-width columns. > > But they aren't limited to 8 characters. Usernames can be longer.
Yes. And no. There's a large variety of silly limits on username length, from 8 _characters_ (or is it width? well, we don't really do I18N for usernames...) to 32 _bytes_. The 8 character limit is all about column formatting in tools like ps(1) and ls(1). The 32 byte limit is from utmpx. Usernames <= 8 chars will work for everything. Usernames > 8 chars may break some scripts. Usernames > 32 may fail to login, and anyways their usernames will be truncated in utmpx. > Even worse is the lack of consistency - as I recall ps -u looks > at the first 10 characters of a username when looking for a match. > We need to get rid of this, once and for all. Yes, yes we do. IIRC there are bugs filed for this, and Darren Moffat has a web page somewhere listing all of these problems. Nico -- _______________________________________________ zones-discuss mailing list zones-discuss@opensolaris.org
