A dot in a username and groupname

[Messiah]

Dear all,

I desparately need the ability to add a user with a dot in its username and its groupname, just like I could on Mandrake systems and other systems I have been using.

So how can I do this in Gentoo?

# useradd test.test
useradd: invalid user name 'test.test'

# groupadd test.test
groupadd: test.test is a not a valid group name

I tried adding the user manually in /etc/passwd, and the user in /etc/group, it seems to go ok, but then I can't change the password:

#passwd test.test
passwd: Authentication token manipulation error

Help!

[Naan Yaar]

You need to add an entry to /etc/shadow to set the password. Something that looks like this:
test.test::10730:0:99999:7:::
Then use passwd to reset the password.

[Messiah]

I was about to edit my post to say that i forgot to add an entry in shadow. After that it worked.

This is a nice fallbak option.

But I want to do it via the command groupadd and useradd. Any ideas? I know I could write it myself, and I will if I cannot find another script that will handle this, but why reinvent the weel if it already is invented?

[handsomepete]

[Naan Yaar]

In this case, using single quotes shouldn't really matter since the '.' is safe in terms of shell wildcarding anyway. Looks like we may be using different versions of useradd.

[Messiah]

# useradd 'test.test'
useradd: invalid user name 'test.test'

and quotes shouldn't matter at all, i think handsomepete can add just test.test without single quotes. So why is handsomepete able to do this and I am not?

[handsomepete]

Yeah, I suppose I could've tested without quotes... (periods are not spaces.. *sigh*). It worked for me because I'm at work and did that on a Red Hat box without thinking that it was a Gentoo specific issue . I can't imagine what would stop that from working... I can do it on everything here at work (Digital Unix 4.0, AIX 4, Red Hat Linux...). There's not an 8 char username limit in Gentoo, is there?

Just out of curiousity can you emerge superadduser and try it via that util? I know it's just a front end, but it might play differently... I have no idea.

[Messiah]

superadduser doesn't work
there is no 8 character limit on usernames or groupnames in Gentoo

I will write a perl script that will work for me and will post it here

[Messiah]

Well..I wrote my own script to handle this.

See this link:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=6638