[Mageia-discuss] Feature request: uppercase letters in user names

Thu Dec 15 03:40:51 CET 2011

On Wed, 2011-12-14 at 13:32 -0300, Renaud (Ron) Olgiati wrote:
+> On Wednesday 14 Dec 2011 13:01 my mailbox was graced by a message from Florian 
+> Hubold who wrote:
+> > Well, then just change the prompt, so it will display iZoli. Why do we need
+> > to support uppercase letters in user names for that?
+> 
+> because the prompt usually includes the username, in the form of the 
+> user home directory name ?
+
+The home directory does not need to have the same name as the user's
+login name.
+
+Traditionally, Unix systems used to switch to Teletype Mode if you
+ttpyed an upper case letter in your username during login; in this mode,
+upper case characters were translated to lower on input, and to \c on
+output, assuming you were using a device that could not handle lower
+case. Try "stty lcase" to experiment with this :-)
+
+Some vestiges of this remain, and, e.g. you still can't easily have two
+usernames that differ only in case unless they have the same userid
+in /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, unless you really do know what you're
+doing with mail and http configuration, as well as authentication. You
+might find also that you have problems with remote access using ssh,
+ftp, etc.
+
+Simplest probably just to change your bash prompt :-)
+
+Liam
+
+-- 
+Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
+Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
+
+