[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#367428: sysvinit: last cut the username if its longer than eight charactersBcc: pre@usit.uio.no

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

I do not believe it is a good idea to add a new option to last, unless
such option is added to all unix implementations around.

Also, the 8 character user name limit can be traced to POSIX, where
only 8 characters are guaranteed to work.  See _POSIX_LOGIN_NAME_MAX in
<URL:http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xsh/limits.h.html>.
I believe it is smart to limit user name lengths to 8 characters until
that limit is increased.

I'm not sure how to best rewrite 'last' to handle longer user names,
without surprising script writers with code already using 'last'.
Just printing longer strings and pushing the line to the right for
those entries with longer usernames might work for those fetching the
first work on the list, but not for those fetching character 1-8.

Anyone know how other unix variants handle long user names in 'last'?

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen