> 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.

Um..._allowing_ characters that break NIS doesn't constitute breaking
NIS, especially if we splash warnings all over the manpages - and
perhaps at runtime; ISTM it would make sense to warn if NIS is enabled
and such a username is added.

But...what breaks?  I once had to work with NIS, and I don't recall
anything in there that would break with nonprintables (except for
newline and possibly tab...oh, and NUL).

> 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.

Odd.  Sure you were typing your lnext character where appropriate?

> 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

I just now created a user called t\2u (C-style) or t\^Bu (vis(3)
style).  Except that my shell won't let me use ~t^Bu to refer to its
home directory (probably because it considers ^B a non-letter),
everything seemed to work.  I set a password, logged in over a "telnet
127.0.0.1" connection, logged out....

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