The 'chown xxx.yyy' syntax has been deprecated for several releases now, the correct syntax being 'chown xxx:yyy'. The newly released stable version of coreutils, 5.2.0, now rejects the old syntax unless _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 is found in the environment. I have updated the spec files (in CVS HEAD) for all of the RPM packages that I found using the old syntax, but I have not rebuilt them. They will be rebuilt shortly -- I have notified the package owners. Once everything is settled down, perhaps we will be able to remove the restriction that prevents user names containing '.'. See also: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=116536 Tim. */