[Mageia-discuss] Feature request: uppercase letters in user names

Liam R E Quin liam at holoweb.net
Thu Dec 15 03:40:51 CET 2011


On Wed, 2011-12-14 at 13:32 -0300, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 Dec 2011 13:01 my mailbox was graced by a message from Florian 
> Hubold who wrote:
> > Well, then just change the prompt, so it will display iZoli. Why do we need
> > to support uppercase letters in user names for that?
> 
> because the prompt usually includes the username, in the form of the 
> user home directory name ?

The home directory does not need to have the same name as the user's
login name.

Traditionally, Unix systems used to switch to Teletype Mode if you
ttpyed an upper case letter in your username during login; in this mode,
upper case characters were translated to lower on input, and to \c on
output, assuming you were using a device that could not handle lower
case. Try "stty lcase" to experiment with this :-)

Some vestiges of this remain, and, e.g. you still can't easily have two
usernames that differ only in case unless they have the same userid
in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, unless you really do know what you're
doing with mail and http configuration, as well as authentication. You
might find also that you have problems with remote access using ssh,
ftp, etc.

Simplest probably just to change your bash prompt :-)

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/



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