Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!mouse
From: mouse@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Length of User names
Message-ID: <1991Jun11.044955.25922@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu>
Date: 11 Jun 91 04:49:55 GMT
References: <1991Jun1.194721.25383@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> <1991Jun05.235228.4667@chinet.chi.il.us>
Organization: McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines
Lines: 28

In article <1991Jun05.235228.4667@chinet.chi.il.us>, les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
> In article <3614@litchi.bbn.com> rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) writes:
[an attribution line seems to have been lost here]
>>> 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.

Fine.

> 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.

Okay, so it's broken.  So what?  A good reason to use something else
instead, something to which you have source.

Just because brokenness is in a widespread program doesn't make it any
less broken.

					der Mouse

			old: mcgill-vision!mouse
			new: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu