Length of User names

[Paul Slootman]

In article <16322 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>For an example of why hacking the system interface is harmful, consider
>those applications that attempt to get usernames and provide only 8+1
>characters of storage for them, because that was a known feature of the
>operating system implementation.  Longer user names will break such
>programs, and no it is NOT practical to find them all and change them.

On at least the ICL System V.2 systems, who -q would output multiple
entries for users who were logged in once, if there were people logged
in with lognames of 8 characters. My guess is that exactly 8 bytes were
reserved for the logname. While sorting the list of names (which who -q
in that version System V did) I suppose something goes wrong... ICL said
that it wasn't a bug, I should use lognames of max. 7 bytes, i.e. it
was my fault.

Paul.
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