Can a Solaris 11 account prefixed with # be used to login? I have been given a list of accounts on a Solaris 11 server that contains several accounts which are prefixed with a # character: "#username". (No LDAP is being used, and all accounts are local Solaris server accounts.) The server admin has told me that Solaris accounts prefixed with # cannot be used to login. I have tried to find some documentation to back-up this claim, but I have only found < where a contributor wrote that prefixing a line in etc/passwd would result in an account which has # as the first character. (The discussion is from 2005 and it isn't clear whether it is related to Solaris, or some other Unix-based/derived OS.) So can a Solaris account prefixed with # be used to login, or will the OS prevent a successful login?

According to the `passwd(5)` manual, a username starting with a character other than a alphabetic one should generate a warning (presumably when the `passwd` database is accessed).

It's possible that your admin relies on the fact that the entries for users that should not be allowed to log in are simply _malformed_ (note that there is no facility to _comment out_ lines in the `passwd` file).

I would suggest that instead of relying on malformed entries, users that should not be allowed to log in are properly restricted using `passwd -N username` instead (see `passwd(1)`), or through some similar mechanics. Or possibly just deleted, if the users should not exist on the system.