Description of problem: The username is not fully displayed in "last" output Only the first 8 characters are shown. Given the man page does notmention this limitation, and given further the user name is not limited to 8 characters on RHEL (adduser allows longer usernames, redhat-config-user does, UT_NAMESIZE is 32), this hard limit is insufficient, especially if you have a username that is 8 chars long and a second user with a name that is longer, but has the same first 8 chars. The same applies to "w" in the procps and "who" in the coreutils packages. utmp and wtmp do have proper data, Other utils (ls, utmpdump) handle long file names correctly. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 2.85-4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. create user a12345678901234567890 using adduser or redhat-config-users 2. ls -la /home :observe home directory name and owner/group are shown properly in full length 3. log in as that user 4. use w, who and observe you show only up as a1234567 5. logout 6. use last to observe you show only up as a1234567 (which may be confusing, if, by coincidence, another user on the system is named a1234567 Actual results: see above Expected results: login names should be shown in full length.If this is not feasible for optical reasons (columns), the output should mark them as cut off, and a command line option to display them using the full name (distorting columns if needed) should be available. Additional info: I know that historically, Unix had a 8char username limit. However I thought these days were long gone. And especially with 32bit UIDs...
Typo: Make this "Other utils (ls, utmpdump) handle long login names correctly"
Red Hat strives to work within the community of upstream open source projects. This allows us to reduce the likelihood of regressions between releases as well as to benefit from features and fixes as development moves forward. This change would require a significant divergence from the upstream project and is therefore being rejected. The upstream site is ftp://ftp.cistron.nl/pub/people/miquels/sysvinit/; they may be amenable to this suggestion.
*** Bug 172247 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***