On Thu, 2006-09-21 at 10:47 -0500, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote: > Quoting "Miner, Jonathan W (CSC) (US SSA)" <jonathan.w.miner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > > > The chown(1) man page says that a colon ":" is the delimiting character: > > > > NAME > > chown - change file owner and group > > > > SYNOPSIS > > chown [OPTION]... [OWNER][:[GROUP]] FILE... > > Couple of lines down in the same man page is the following sentence: > > "If the user name is followed by a colon or dot and a group name (or > numeric group ID), with no spaces between them, the group ownership of > the files is changed as well." > > Chown in Linux uses dot as alternative separator between user name and > group name for compatibility with some Unix systems that use dot > separator. Dot was choosen as separator since it is not allowed in > user names. On Unix systems, it is advisable to limit yourself to > 8-chars usernames (most utilities will work fine with longer > usernames, but not all of them). And also to limit yourself what > characters you are using. > I can't find any documentation that states the dot character is not allowed in user names. In fact I have user names with dots, underscores and @ symbols in them all of which work as expected. I was also under the impression that the dot separator in chown was deprecated in favour of the colon, but the man page certainly doesn't reflect that. -- Karl Latiss <karl.latiss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Atvert Systems -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
