Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!ucsd!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!esosun!seismo!uunet!auspex!guy From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: GCOS field (Was re: Difference among different UNIX versions) Message-ID: <572@auspex.UUCP> Date: 4 Dec 88 07:57:04 GMT References: <17641@adm.BRL.MIL> <8980@smoke.BRL.MIL> <8516@elsie.UUCP> <1257@vsedev.VSE.COM> <411@maxim.ERBE.SE> Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara Lines: 32 >> Does anyone know what GCOS really stands for and where it came from? > >Or what the BSD and AT&T GCOS field formats are? Yes. They are both strings of text (preferably printable characters and blanks) containing no colons. Few, if any, programs provided by AT&T as part of its releases assume a particular format for that field; some people appear to think that the format in the file distributed with S5 releaes - which, as far as I know, just happens to be a format used by administrators within AT&T for their own convenience - is some sort of standard. The only AT&T convention I know of is the "pri=nnn" stuff at the front, which "login" uses to set the "nice" value when you log in. I know of no software provided with S5 that obliges you to have a GCOS field in the form nnnn-Name(nnnn) (in fact, several of the accounts used, I guess, for "sysadm" in the S5R3 "passwd" file *don't* use that format). Nevertheless, I see a lot postings from non-AT&T sites where they've blindly adopted that format. The BSD format is described in ADDUSER(8); this, unfortunately, is actually used by some programs - said programs even make assumptions about phone numbers and office names! Basically, leave out commas, and you can probably put anything there. The BSD format includes a convention that not all programs necessarily honor, which means you may not want to use that convention: if the "&" character appears in the "gecos" field, those programs replace it with the login name with the first letter capitalized. This means you probably want to leave out "&" as well.