Xref: utzoo comp.unix.wizards:13684 news.sysadmin:2002 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!att!ulysses!andante!alice!debra From: debra@alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,news.sysadmin Subject: Re: Special chars humor (was password security) Message-ID: <8599@alice.UUCP> Date: 24 Dec 88 19:03:11 GMT References: <8594@alice.UUCP> <3934@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <8598@alice.UUCP> Reply-To: debra@alice.UUCP () Organization: AT&T, Bell Labs Lines: 21 In article <8598@alice.UUCP> ark@alice.UUCP (Andrew Koenig) writes: ]In article <3934@pt.cs.cmu.edu>, dlc@dlc.fac.cs.cmu.edu (Daryl Clevenger) writes: ]> Being relatively naive about ]> UNIX and not knowing its history, he picked '@' as his special character, ]> which /bin/passwd gladly accepted. ] ]Why is this a problem? He just has to enter `@' as `\@'. ]-- ] --Andrew Koenig It is a problem because of the inconsistency: the password he gave to the passwd program is NOT the password he has to type to log on. Passwd should have treated the char @ the same way login does, even if this user has a different kill-line character, because login will use the default. Paul. -- ------------------------------------------------------ |debra@research.att.com | uunet!research!debra | ------------------------------------------------------