From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jul 15 03:30:50 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id DAA19858 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 15 Jul 1997 03:30:50 -0700 (PDT) Received: from veda.is (veda.is [193.4.230.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA19853 for ; Tue, 15 Jul 1997 03:30:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ubiq.veda.is (ubiq.veda.is [193.4.230.60]) by veda.is (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA14951 for ; Tue, 15 Jul 1997 10:30:41 GMT From: Adam David Received: (from adam@localhost) by ubiq.veda.is (8.8.6/8.8.5) id KAA23198 for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Tue, 15 Jul 1997 10:30:37 GMT Message-Id: <199707151030.KAA23198@ubiq.veda.is> Subject: numeric UID/GID names? To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 10:30:36 +0000 (GMT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL31 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Are there any problems involved with giving users/groups all-numeric names, in addition to the confusion that could exist when for instance UID number 1234 is named 4321 (or 5678)? What problems might this confusion give rise to? Which are human-based and which are programmatical? Is this any different if all such names are larger numbers than the maximum available ID#, or some other identification scheme is used? (for instance, rather than specify >4G of users all individually, they could be hashed into subgroups of which all members share a common ID, or individual members could be tagged on entry and exit from the ID pool). -- Adam David