usernames

[Randy Donohoe]

> Because periods and other punctuation marks are typically used
> in regular expressions, so processing usernames with, say, !
> in it becomes quite interesting and requires special handling.
> For example:
>
> $ export UNAME="kurt!wall"
> bash: !wall": event not found
>
> Here, Bash treats "!" like as it would when doing command history
> searches. The grep command (actually, anything that uses regular
> expressions) treats "." as a placholder for any single character,
> which can create aggravating problems in text utilities.
>
> Kurt
That makes sense. What we're going to do is use aliases(a user on the
libranet list came up with that one).
Thanks,
Randy