Bug#705483: xfsprogs: xfs_quota misinterprets usernames with leading digits

[Rich Johnston]

On 04/16/2013 03:17 AM, James Carter wrote:
> On 15/04/13 17:07, Rich Johnston wrote:
>>
>> I don't think this is a bug, username must begin with a character
>> (unless you created the user using NIS or adduser --force-badname).
>
> My understanding that this is a recommendation rather than a
> requirement. useradd(8) has the following to say:
>
>         On Debian, the only constraints are that usernames must neither
> start
>         with a dash ('-') nor contain a colon (':') or a whitespace
> (space: '
>         ', end of line: '\n', tabulation: '\t', etc.). Note that using a
> slash
>         ('/') may break the default algorithm for the definition of the
> user's
>         home directory.
>
> In any case, I'd still consider it a bug that trailing non-numeric
> characters were just silently ignored.
>

Interesting I was not aware of the Debian difference.  My understanding 
was that usernames with leading digits would have trouble with other 
utilities on other versions of Unix and flavors of Linux as they would 
interpret the username as numeric UID.  I was able to create a user with 
leading digits and trailing alpha characters using vipw.  Because  chown 
works using this username, we will look into fixing this bug.  Thanks 
for pointing it out.

--Rich