Setting the User Name

The username variable is used during a call to indicate to the remote party who is calling. As it is often the deciding factor as to whether a call is accepted, it is recommended that this be set to an identifying string which tells people who you are. Technically, this variable can be anything you would like provided that it is printable, full names and email addresses are commonly placed here. As an example, my username might be set as follows.

intercom: set username 'Shane Wegner <shane@cm.nu>'

You might have noticed that the quoting used is a bit different from the previous example, single quotes are used instead of double quotes. This is actually not necessary in this case as double quotes are sufficient but some special characters do need to be quoted using single quotes. The rules are the same as those employed by the Unix shell.

Another example of setting the username variable is setting it to your Unix login name. This can be done through variable substitution. The following command demonstrates this feature.

intercom: set username $USER

Note

This will set the username variable to the value of the USER environment variable.