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Historical Reasons


November 11, 2025 In 2011 after Dennis Ritchie died, I wondered if we should start retiring usernames on unix systems as an honorific, in the same way sports teams will retire the numbers of great players. I’d proposed a patch to useradd.c at the time that was rejected; understandable, I suppose, but I ran the modified version on my own machine for a while, to no effect and for no reasons but my own.

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Historical Reasons