From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jul 15 07:14:10 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id HAA29041 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 15 Jul 1997 07:14:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phoenix.its.rpi.edu (dec@phoenix.its.rpi.edu [128.113.161.45]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA29032 for ; Tue, 15 Jul 1997 07:14:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (dec@localhost) by phoenix.its.rpi.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id KAA04012; Tue, 15 Jul 1997 10:14:48 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 10:14:48 -0400 (EDT) From: "David E. Cross" To: Adam David cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: numeric UID/GID names? In-Reply-To: <199707151030.KAA23198@ubiq.veda.is> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Tue, 15 Jul 1997, Adam David wrote: > Are there any problems involved with giving users/groups all-numeric names, > in addition to the confusion that could exist when for instance UID number > 1234 is named 4321 (or 5678)? > > What problems might this confusion give rise to? Which are human-based > and which are programmatical? It would depend on the program... Some programs do a atoi(3) to determine if the 'value' is a UID or UNAME. The human errors should be more than enough reason to avoid this though and go with an alternate naming scheme; instead of user '4321' how about user 'u4321'? -- David Cross