>>>>> "Rachel" == Rachel Polanskis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Rachel> Hi sluggers,
Rachel> We have been using a daemin called "idled" for some time
Rachel> to logout users who we don't want left logged in forever or
Rachel> to exempt userssuch as myself from being logged out.
Rachel> I then decided to return to the source but I can't locate
Rachel> where it bombs, except in a yacc file "parse.y". Now, yacc is as
Rachel> foreign to me as Sanscrit and I think I would go insane trying to
Rachel> learn it.
Rachel> I checked my Sun headers and there doesn't appear to be anything stopping
Rachel> me usin numeric logins in pwnam or it's friends. "pwck" doesn't
Rachel> seem to like all numeric logins either but very little else has
Rachel> broken (even sudo now has numeric login support).
There's nothing to stop you using all numeric login names, except that
lots of programs assume that you can't (they typically assume that if
something is all numeric it's a UID not a login name). POSIX puts no
restrictions on login names.
When I was at Uni, my login name was the same as my student number for 5
years, until I became a postgrad and was allowed a login that matched
my name. The practice of using all-numeric login names was ceased I
think when the teaching systems were moved off Vaxen and PDP-11s to
Apollos, which refused to accept all-numerics as logins.
Anyway as to your parse.y problem:
Somewhere in parse.y there's this:
who : name_type NAME
That says that a name is a NAME -- which is something that starts with
an alphabetic character (see the regexp in scan.l).
Unfortunately, changing this to accept a numeric string isn't that
straightforward.
The simplest way to fix your problem may be to use the `file'
directive: usernames in a file aren't scanned to separate numbers from
strings, so anything in there will do.
Peter C
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