Why are dots in username & groupname no longer allowed?

[alex at milivojevic.org (Aleksandar Milivojevic)]

Quoting Robin Mordasiewicz <robin@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

> On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Benjamin Smith wrote:
>
>> Try this one:
>>
>> chown -R c.smith.users /home/c.smith
>>
>> See the problem?
>>
> what about
> chown -R c.smith:users /home/c.smith

The ':' is not really an solution because it doesn't really address the 
problem.
The problem is that the first syntax (using dot) is valid.

Consider you have users "foo" and "foo.bar" and group "bar".  What will "chown
foo.bar file" do?  Change the owner of the file to user foo.bar or change the
owner to foo and group to bar?  Yes, you can use column instead of dot on
command line.  However, many scripts still use dot (and there is nothing wrong
with it, since using dot to separate username and group is perfectly valid).


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