From: Kyle Hayes <kyle@marchex•com>
To: azarah@nosferatu•za.org
Cc: GIT Mailing Lists <git@vger•kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [patch] fixup GECOS handling
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 10:43:50 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1114191830.31076.426.camel@axer.marchex.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1114189105.29271.36.camel@nosferatu.lan>
On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 18:58 +0200, Martin Schlemmer wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 09:16 -0700, Kyle Hayes wrote:
> > Suppose that the GECOS field is:
> >
> > Hayes, Kyle; Room 42; 424-424-4242; foo bar baz...
> >
> > You'll search for the first comma, find it, truncate my name to "Hayes",
> > and continue.
> >
> > I have seen this kind of GECOS in larger environments where the
> > individual users are not the ones that administrate their machines.
> > Using the LastName, FirstName style of name is not rare.
> >
>
> What OS? With Linux at least, this is what chfn's manpage say:
Can't remember, it's been a while (years). We had AIX, Solaris, Linux
and BSD machines at the time. Might have been AIX, I think. The memory
of which OS is vague, but not the annoyance of finding the problem :-(
> ----
> The only restriction placed on the contents of the fields is that no control characters may be present,
> nor any of comma, colon, or equal sign. The other field does not have this restriction, and is used to
> store accounting information used by other applications.
> ----
>
> Meaning, if they use a ',' in one of the fields (and it is a linux
> system with the chfn most probably from the shadow package), then they
> are looking for trouble. The only reason I added the ';' was because
> somebody said whatever OS used it instead of a ','.
>From the AIX version of chfn:
----
You can use any printable characters in the gecos information string
except a : (colon), which is an attribute delimiter.
----
The AIX examples show use of semicolon as a separator.
So, at least on AIX, it is appears valid to use the style I showed
above. I don't have access to Solaris machines right now. The BSD
(FreeBSD 4.11) version of man 5 passwd:
----
The gecos field normally contains comma (`,') separated subfields as
follows:...
----
Best,
Kyle
--
Kyle Hayes <kyle@marchex•com>
Marchex Inc.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2005-04-22 17:40 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2005-04-18 10:36 [patch] fixup GECOS handling Martin Schlemmer
2005-04-18 12:35 ` David Woodhouse
2005-04-18 12:58 ` Martin Schlemmer
2005-04-22 14:23 ` Martin Schlemmer
2005-04-22 16:16 ` Kyle Hayes
2005-04-22 16:58 ` Martin Schlemmer
2005-04-22 17:18 ` Petr Baudis
2005-04-22 17:25 ` Martin Schlemmer
2005-04-22 17:58 ` Kyle Hayes
2005-04-22 19:06 ` Martin Schlemmer
2005-04-22 20:46 ` Kyle Hayes
2005-04-23 23:38 ` Petr Baudis
2005-04-23 23:49 ` Martin Schlemmer
2005-04-22 17:43 ` Kyle Hayes [this message]
2005-04-22 23:30 ` Andy Isaacson
2005-04-25 17:02 ` Kyle Hayes
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=1114191830.31076.426.camel@axer.marchex.com \
--to=kyle@marchex$(echo .)com \
--cc=azarah@nosferatu$(echo .)za.org \
--cc=git@vger$(echo .)kernel.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox