>Consider that a username might be "foo.bar", "foo", "bar" and a group
>name to match each of those.
>
>If I do "chown foo.bar /tmp/foryou" what should happen ?
>
>Is the best option, in this case, to simply bail out becase the user
>is not being clear about what they want to do ?

imho, . should not be allowed as part of a username.  as part of an
alias, maybe, but not as a username.  the problem is actually that it
was never specifically disallowed, as colon was.

that's probably why sysv went with : instead of the bsd . for the
chown user:group separator.

there are probably *plenty* of characters that "shouldn't" be allowed
in usernames that aren't specifically disallowed.

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