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Date:      Tue, 4 Jul 2000 15:30:09 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Paul Herman <pherman@frenchfries.net>
To:        Paisios Gatsos <paisios1@hotmail.com>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: username longer than 16 letters
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0007041523080.1118-100000@bagabeedaboo.security.at12.de>
In-Reply-To: <20000704131309.15075.qmail@hotmail.com>

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On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Paisios Gatsos wrote:

> i 've tried today to create a user with 18 letters and i
> discovered that the adduser command doesn't allow user names
> greater than 16 letters. I read at the man pages that you need to
> "edit the file /usr/include/utmp.h and then recompile the world"
> if you want bigger names. Because i have a lot of stuff in my
> computer and don't want to re-install all of them, isn't there an
> easier way to do this?

Nope.  Many programs depend on this.  Rumor has it it "Works"(tm), but
is not recommended.

There was just a thread on this on a de.freebsd.org mailing list a
little while ago.  Main reasons for long login names are usually just
to have long email addresses which can be taken care of with email
aliases.

If you want users to login using something like "Firstname_Lastname"
like in Windows, then you could even use Kerberos or LDAP, YMMV.

All said, there is almost *no* reason to have usernames longer than 16
characters that some other existing software package won't do. (If you
have more than 37*38^15 users, you have another problem all together.
:)

-Paul.



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