On Sat, Sep 29, 2007 at 12:42:38PM +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams at sun.com> wrote:
> > The 8 character limit is all about column formatting in tools like ps(1)
> > and ls(1). The 32 byte limit is from utmpx.
>
> utmpx has no specific user name limit in POSIX.
Maybe so, but:
struct utmpx {
char ut_user[32]; /* user login name */
...
That's what's in Solaris. And the layout (and probably size) of struct
utmpx is part of the ABI.
> Before POSIX.1-2001, there indeed was a hard limit but this limit was from
> TAR!
>
> With the new extended tar headers from POSIX.1-2001, user names could be
> _really_ llong.
Fine, but then we have to extend utmpx.
