Arch Linux

lesto

Member

Registered: 2010-07-13

Posts: 115

uppercase username

Hi,
i've recently tryed to add a new user with uppercase letter in its name, but it doesn't work.
Why there is souch limitation, can i saftely turn it off? if yes how?

thank you

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: uppercase username

Usernames must start with a lower case letter or an underscore, followed by lower case letters, digits, underscores, or dashes. They can end with a dollar sign. In regular expression terms: [a-z_][a-z0-9_-]*[$]?

Usernames may only be up to 32 characters long.

Last edited by karol (2013-09-18 20:49:19)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,260

Re: uppercase username

I am not in front of a Linux box right now, so I cannot try it.  I do know that in the ancient days (circa 1980's) Unix would assume that if your user name started with a capital letter, then you must be on an upper case only terminal and would adapt accordingly.  I doubt this artifact still exists, but, if it does, blame the terminals of yesteryear and the workarounds for them.

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lesto

Member

Registered: 2010-07-13

Posts: 115

Re: uppercase username

ok, this problem exist in archlinux but not in red had, porting some ftp machine has created some problem because of that, but we manage to change the configuration from the clients.

if this is a relic from the past, can't i disable this check? i've seen that ubuntu's adduser has a conf file where you can specify your own regex....

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: uppercase username

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=165574