Sorry usernames cannot begin with a number!

[bigste]

Is there a good reason why usernames cannot begin with a number?

Obviously it's not a domain naming issue and I can see how 'special characters' might cause trouble but I can't think of a reason why such a rule would have to be enforced by the cPanel software. Numbers aren't that different to letters, are they?


Is there any way to get around it, I would really like to be able to have numbers for usernames?

[rrwh]

This is nothing to do with CPanel but your underlying OS.

A username has an associated UID and you cannot have a username that is numeric or you will create problems. Lets look at an example

UID 1 is root. Say you create a user called 1.

Now the user called 1 would get confused with user root who has the UID of 1.

Lets say, that user 1 decided to delete all his files on the disk, but the rm command sees the name 1, starts at the top of the password file, gets a match with 1 in the UID (because many commands operate on either the name or UID) and starts deleting everything off the server.

Forget about it - even having a username of alpha and numeric is bad if you start the username with numbers.