Users with too-long usernames

[jbs@bbn.com]

A couple of users on bbn-hn have usernames that are longer than eight characters, which makes them show up as numeric UIDs in 'ps' listings. (The 'flowvisor' and 'geni-orca' users in particular.)

[ibaldin@renci.org]

I'm not sure what we can do here. I'll let Jonathan render judgement.

[jonmills@renci.org]

Please refer to the procps FAQ:

​http://procps.sourceforge.net/faq.html

"The UNIX and POSIX standards require that user names and group names be printed as decimal integers when there is not enough room in the column. Truncating the names, besides being a violation of the standard, would lead to confusion between names like MichelleRichards? and MichelleRichardson?. The UNIX and POSIX way to change column width is to rename the column:

ps -o pid,user=CumbersomeUserNames? -o comm

The easy way is to directly specify the desired width:

ps -o pid,user:19,comm"

[jbs@bbn.com]

That should work, although "the easy way" is a lot more typing. (grin)

The other easy way is not to use usernames that are longer than eight characters. I'd recommend doing that.

If that's problematic, we can close this one out as wontfix, since there's a reasonable (if mildly annoying) workaround.

[jonmills@renci.org]

So, the simple answer is that it's not broken. There's nothing to fix. 'won't fix' doesn't even apply. We can choose to adopt, as a guideline, <= 8 char usernames from now on, to make our own lives easier. But outside of that, I think this is a non-ticket.

[jbs@bbn.com]

Ok, we can close it as "invalid" then.