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I have been unable to determine what the valid characters are for a z/OS userid. Does it follow the same rules as a dataset qualifier or is it less/more restrictive? I know until recently, userids could only be 7 characters but saw that this is now extended to 8, however I am unsure what the valid characters are in the name

mike
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A RACF User ID can consist of A-Z, 0-9, #, $, or @.

It appears through testing that USERIDs are more restrictive than dataset names as the hyphen character is not a valid USERID character. Through testing, I was unable to create an ID named ST-VEN on a RACF system in z/OS 2.5.

See here for more info: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.5.0?topic=users-user-naming-conventions

Steven Perva
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    Thanks! This begs the question of whether a 'RACF User ID' can have different characters than a 'TSO or MVS User ID'. Do they not all need to be the same? Can I associate an MVS Userid with a different TSO Userid with a different RACF userid and maybe with a different UNIX System Services Userid or are they one and all the same? – mike Jul 07 '23 at 21:15
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    An interesting observation is that I could create a userid that started with a numeric digit, but then I would not be able to create any datasets using my userid as the high level qualifier. – mike Jul 07 '23 at 21:54
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    They're all one and the same, but if you used some other security manager instead of RACF it could have different rules. The rules for TSO are actually *more* restrictive than RACF's, though, and JES2's even more so: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.5.0?topic=tsoe-selecting-user-id - No longer than seven or eight characters based on the installation setting - First character - Must be an alphabetic or national - With JES2 a user ID: - Cannot be in the format Rnnnnnn or Nnnnnnn - Should not be in the format Unnnnnn – Glenn Knickerbocker Jul 07 '23 at 22:03
  • @StevenPerva Would you please delete your comment which is identical to your answer. It is of no additional value. – phunsoft Jul 09 '23 at 20:26