On Thu, 24 Apr 1997, John F. Woods wrote:

> The format is defined to have 6 characters for UID and GID, one of which
> must be a NUL byte.  (I suppose you could go up to 99999, at the risk of
> loony behavior on systems with 16 bit variables for uid and gid....

If you're going to risk that, you might as well go all the way and
encode UIDs beyond 65536 in base-62 or larger (using A-Za-z0-9 and
whatever other printables you care to throw in). That will at least
get you over the ten million mark for uid and gid.

Whether or not we really care is another matter.

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca	   Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	   Through infinite myst, software reverberates
Vancouver, BC  (604) 257-9400	   In code possess'd of invisible folly.