In particular, NIS does not handle unprintable characters anywhere with
any degree of decorum.  Keep your "NIS is bad" to yourself.  It's still
used, and we can't break that.

I was able to change my password once to something with a control char
in it, but it wouldn't let me change it back because of that control
char.  I suspect one might run into similar problems with usernames.
If someone can test this with usernames and prove me wrong, I'd love
to hear about it. 8-D

struct just_my {
	char worth:2;
};

On Thu, 15 Nov 2001, der Mouse wrote:

# Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 19:10:09 -0500 (EST)
# From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
# To: tech-userlevel@netbsd.org
# Subject: Re: useradd: spaces and $ in usernames
#
# >> It's been brought to my attention that there might be desires to use
# >> spaces and $s in login names[*], and I wonder if there's a really
# >> good reason (besides the obvious ones :-) to not allow all but ':'
# >> in login names?  (If admins want it, give 'em the rope etc.)
#
# > You definitely don't want to allow unprintable characters.
#
# (a) Why not?  (Okay, in the case of newline, there is a good reason why
# not.  But for others?)  People wouldn't normally use them, no, but as
# the original message (probably inadvertently) pointed out, not all
# usernames belong to people.
#
# (b) For whose value of "unprintable"?  ASCII?  ISO 8859?  JIS
# whatever-it-is?  (Escape-sequence character set shifts in usernames?)
#
# /~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
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				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: The cure for the common OS.