Certain non-latin characters appear to cause saving the name to fail, like :, whereas others, like =, don’t. Does an exhaustive list of disallowed characters exist, and more importantly, can these be escaped? If so, why isn’t the KCM doing this?
From the manual for useradd;
It is usually recommended to only use usernames that begin with a lower case letter or an underscore, followed by lowercase letters, digits, underscores, or dashes. They can end with a dollar sign
In practical terms, these constraints are not necessarily enforced by tools that add users, but deviating from them could lead to some software not functioning properly, when it attempts to use your username or a file path containing your username (e.g. your home directory).
As usernames are used in many contexts (file system, return value from various APIs, etc.), there is no standard for handling/escaping special characters.
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This isn’t the username field though, right?
The options which apply to the chfn command are:
-f, --full-name FULL_NAME
Change the user's full name.
Though I’m thankful anyway, @Herzenschein and @dirthsj,because
and
are both useful for