'last' command won't find 8-char usernames

[rbarrell]

     Recently, a friend of mine noticed that even though I had logged onto his
system a number of times, the 'last' command would not show any entries for me
if he asked for "rbarrell" directly.  When other options of 'last' (or none at
all) were used, everything was fine.  
     After a little experimentation and snooping around on my own machine, I
noticed that utmp.h specifies ut_user[8].  I have heard that user names were
supposed to be no more than 8 characters, but this would indicate that 7 should
be the real maximum.  If not, it means whoever programmed that structure, and
wanted to allow for 8-character usernames, forgot to allow for the null at the
end of the string. 
     I have never had any difficulties in using 8-character names, but I wonder
if there is a potential problem in my doing so, since ut_user[] has only 8
characters.  For the 'last' command, this is relatively minor, but is there
anything else, that uses the utmp structure, which could be more seriously
affected?
     BTW, since my use of an 8-character username causes ut_user[] to run right
into ut_id[], the solution to the 'last' command problem was to put the terminal
id as part of my username when searching (e.g. "last rbarrell1A").  This would
indicate one (or more) of the following:

1) Usernames should really never exceed 7 characters.
2) Someone goofed and didn't allow for the null at the end of ut_user[].
3) Whoever wrote 'last' goofed by not using strncmp(ut_user,name,strlen(name))
   instead of strcmp(ut_user,name).

     This behavior is found on SCO xenix 2.3.x on 286 and 386 machines (I have
not had the opportunity to test it on others, especially since older versions
of SCO didn't have 'last').  Has anyone else experienced this on other versions
of *nix?

-- 
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