I have a question about single character user names. I have a triple boot system - OpenSuse, Debian and Arch. Debian and Arch, which were installed first, allowed me to use a single character user name for my normal login. OpenSuse would not. It stipulated that a minimum of 2 characters was required for a user name.
I should like to have the same user name for each distro, and it is convenient, if you have to type in the user name, just to have to type in a single character.
It is useful to have the same user name on each distro, because you can, without hassle, save and open any file on your home folder of a distro you are not using at the time. I can do this between Debian and Arch without any trouble. Since OpenSuse requires 2 characters it obviously sees the single character user-names as different users. The only way I can swap files around between OpenSuse and the others is to become root on a CLI and cp or mv them that way. Then I have to remember to change the permissions on the file moved to OpenSuse back from root to OpenSuse user-name.
Does anyone know if there is a configuration file somewhere that I can modify to allow the creation of new-user home folders with single character user names?
Thanks in advance.
There is a definition of CHARACTER_CLASS in /etc/logins.def which if I read the regex correctly will require at least two characters. You could modify that.
Or you could work around it another way. Create the account and then rename it with:
usermod -f b -m -d /home/b bob
to rename the account bob to b and the home directory to /home/b.
Thank you for your prompt reply.
I modified the relevant section in /etc/logins.def :-
User/group names must match the following regex expression.
The default is [A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_.-]*[A-Za-z0-9_.$-]?,
but be aware that the result could depend on the locale settings.
#CHARACTER_CLASS [A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_.-][A-Za-z0-9_.$-]?
CHARACTER_CLASS [ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_][ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_.-][ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_.$-]?
to
User/group names must match the following regex expression.
The default is [A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_.-]*[A-Za-z0-9_.$-]?,
but be aware that the result could depend on the locale settings.
#CHARACTER_CLASS [A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_.-][A-Za-z0-9_.$-]?
#CHARACTER_CLASS [ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_][ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_.-][ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_.$-]?
CHARACTER_CLASS [ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz_]*[ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_.$-]?
As root, I copied the CHARACTER_CLASS line and pasted it underneath the original. I then commented out the original CHARACTER_CLASS line with a #, incase I should need to reinstate it. Then on the new CHARACTER_CLASS line I deleted the second section between square brackets, ], and saved the amended file. This allowed me to create a new user with only one character letter as user-name.
Many thanks for drawing my attention to the relevant file.