Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl
From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Why does buildfname skip past hyphens?
Message-ID: <KARL.89Jan5131728@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 5 Jan 89 18:17:28 GMT
References: <111@indri.primate.wisc.edu>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: OSU
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In-reply-to: bin@primate.wisc.edu's message of 5 Jan 89 15:55:32 GMT

bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) writes:
   The comments in the code say it was lifted from sendmail, but
   there is a difference.  If the name part of the gecos field contains a
   hyphen, the full name is stripped of everything to the left of the
   hyphen.  (sendmail's buildfname() doesn't do this.)  Thus articles by a
   user such as "Firstname Lastname-Hyphenated" get posted as being from
   just "Hyphenated".

That is to accommodate the SysVish habit of having the gecos field be
some set of digits (representing, e.g., departmental affiliation),
followed by a dash and the real name.  In particular, the canned
administrative accounts on SysV machines always come with
"0000-something" in the gecos field.  E.g., root is frequently found
to be
	root:abcefghijklm:0:0:0000-Admin:/:
and hence, the left-of-dash stripping is necessary there.

It might be possible for a better heuristic to determine if it's
really SysVish as opposed to a true hyphenated name (looking for
digits would be a good start), but the generalization as it currently
stands is fairly appropriate.

--Karl