[PATCH] improve checks on usernames V3.

Ralf Friedl Ralf.Friedl at online.de
Wed Aug 3 08:19:55 UTC 2011


Harald Becker wrote:
> On 02.08.2011 22:16, Ralf Friedl wrote:
>   
>> What is the problem with locale-specific characters?
>>     
> Portability is the problem. Especially if tar files of such users and
> untar it on other systems those "none-portable" user names may produce
> trouble. Sometimes serious trouble. I've had to deal with such trouble
> in past. Trouble witch stupid users produced by delivering tar archives
> with such user names.
>   
Tar never creates user when extracting. It should just treat whatever 
comes as a string and pass it to getpwnam, which should also not care 
and use something like strcmp. I would just call that tar program broken.

> ... just to throw that in. Beside this I like to use User Names with
> German Umlauts (ÄÖÜäöü) as regular German names may contain those. And I
> did this successfully on Linux/GNU systems for years ... but know about
> incompatibility and try to handle properly.
>   
I wouldn't want busybox to to tell me what names I can use just to avoid 
potential problems with some obscure system that I don't connect to anyway.

Ralf


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