From: Linus Torvalds Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 16:32:38 GMT Subject: Re: What shall we do with the GECOS field again? Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <7vll1trqiq.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net> On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote: > > What do popular MUAs do to come up with the real-name fields? > Don't they face the same problem, trying to using GECOS? Since I have my pine installed in git, I could git grep it. It says /* full name is all chars up to first ',' (or whole gcos, if no ',') */ /* replace any & with logname in upper case */ I don't know why the & rule, but there you have it.. The Perl User::pwent module seems to agree, btw (also about '&'): "Interpretation of the gecos field varies between systems, but traditionally holds 4 comma-separated fields containing the user's full name, office location, work phone number, and home phone number. An & in the gecos field should be replaced by the user's properly capitalized login name." I still worry about names of the type "Torvalds, Linus", but maybe that's just not an issue. Linus