Shell Programming and Scripting

Sounds like a user management nightmare. Maybe they should use some sort of central authentication server.

The modification you described for changing 4 to 11, and getent to cat group are both correct. But in the case of cat group, you could just use while ((getline < "group_file") > 0)

the "it doesn't exist error" is because a user had a GID that the group_file doesn't... the ones it has will still be correct.

Just a quick note - it is a central management system called KeON but it's split into security domains: development, testing, production, and I dunno how to describe the fourth one. All the development servers communicate within the development domain and so on. Within each domain they have their own ldap implementations, but it took us a while to develop a central GID reservation database. Until that happened some groups were implemented with different GID's then the same group in a different domain. It's a nightmare fo sho

Btw I've been googling this "getline" business. I don't understand why it's any different than redirection? I found this little sample kludge for an exercise on a tutorial site I found:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/awk -f

BEGIN {FS="[ :\t]"; "date" | getline d; print "The Current Date is: "d;
print "#################################################"}

How is it different than this:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

d=`date`
echo "The Current Date is: "$d
echo "#################################################"

I realise you can accomplish things in several different ways and methods but what is the use of getline when all you need to is direct standard output?

In this specific case, the difference is that for the first nine days of each month, the awk form preserves the two spaces between <abbreviated month name> and <day of month>. That difference would be removed if you replace:

Code:

echo "The Current Date is: "$d

with:

Code:

echo "The Current Date is: $d"

But, presumably, you're writing an awk script to do a lot more than just print these two header lines. Why do you want to go through the overhead of starting up a shell to print the header lines with bash and do the rest of your processing with awk when awk can do it just as easily?

Well, I just wasn't sure what the purpose of the "getline" function was compared to the use of redirection. I'm still googling and re-reading the man page at the moment.