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From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Length of User names
Message-ID: <1991Jun05.235228.4667@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 5 Jun 91 23:52:28 GMT
References: <1991Jun1.194721.25383@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> <16322@smoke.brl.mil> <3614@litchi.bbn.com>
Organization: Chinet - Chicago Public Access UNIX
Lines: 17

In article <3614@litchi.bbn.com> rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes:
>> consider
>>those applications that attempt to get usernames and provide only 8+1
>>characters of storage for them
>Such programs are fairly badly written since the header file has
>warned about using "8" for some time and you can safely get the maximum
>allowable size by using sizeof.

Well, you can consider SysVr3's /bin/mail to be fairly badly written, then.
If you use login names >8 characters, mail that matches the first 8
characters of a login name is accepted and up to 14 characters of the
mail address is used for the filename in /usr/mail.  If there was a
mismatch beyond the first 8 characters, the user won't be able to
find or retrieve it.

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us