As I'm installing 3.4 on my box (to replace the 3.3 box that's
currently live), I notice more and more utilities are cutting
over to using leading underscores for administrative names (not meant
for login).

Where is this practice documented and formalized? Are there tools
that reject leading underscores for logins, or is it merely a
decorative convention?

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On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

> Where is this practice documented and formalized? Are there tools
> that reject leading underscores for logins, or is it merely a
> decorative convention?

not documented. it's simply to reduce collisions with real names.
somebody might want to create a user 'syslog' to log in, backup logs, or
whatnot. they are less likely to call that user _syslogd, but there's no
practical difference.


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The law of gravity is racist."
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