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Full Discussion: Good (reliable!) check if user exists
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Good (reliable!) check if user exists Post 302100259 by Corona688 on Monday 18th of December 2006 09:48:54 AM
Old 12-18-2006
Quote:
Originally Posted by _Spare_Ribs_
Hi all,

I've been trying to find a good check I can put it in to a shell script to see if a given user exists.

Some of the things I've thought about is checking whether they have a home directory, but not all users have a home directory. I've thought about grepping the /etc/passwd file for the username but if the username is short and happens to be a repeated string somewhere else in the file then this check could fail or be inaccurate too.
You're close to a solution. Just improve your search string enough and you can fix the substring problem:
Code:
grep "^${USERNAME}:" /etc/passwd

The ^ means "from the beginning of the line", and the : is the field-delimiting character in /etc/passwd, so you're guaranteed to match either the entire username field or nothing at all.
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

git-annex-shell

git-annex-shell(1)					      General Commands Manual						git-annex-shell(1)

NAME

       git-annex-shell - Restricted login shell for git-annex only SSH access

SYNOPSIS

       git-annex-shell [-c] command [params ...]

DESCRIPTION

       git-annex-shell is a restricted shell, similar to git-shell, which can be used as a login shell for SSH accounts.

       Since  its  syntax  is  identical to git-shell's, it can be used as a drop-in replacement anywhere git-shell is used. For example it can be
       used as a user's restricted login shell.

COMMANDS

       Any command not listed below is passed through to git-shell.

       Note that the directory parameter should be an absolute path, otherwise it is assumed to be relative to the user's home directory. Also the
       first "/~/" or "/~user/" is expanded to the specified home directory.

       configlist directory
	      This outputs a subset of the git configuration, in the same form as git config --list

       inannex directory [key ...]
	      This checks if all specified keys are present in the annex, and exits zero if so.

       dropkey directory [key ...]
	      This drops the annexed data for the specified keys.

       recvkey directory key
	      This runs rsync in server mode to receive the content of a key, and stores the content in the annex.

       sendkey directory key
	      This runs rsync in server mode to transfer out the content of a key.

       commit directory
	      This commits any staged changes to the git-annex branch.	It also runs the annex-content hook.

OPTIONS

       Most options are the same as in git-annex. The ones specific to git-annex-shell are:

       --uuid=UUID
	      git-annex uses this to specify the UUID of the repository it was expecting git-annex-shell to access, as a sanity check.

HOOK

       After  content is received or dropped from the repository by git-annex-shell, it runs a hook, .git/hooks/annex-content (or hooks/annex-con-
       tent on a bare repository). The hook is not currently passed any information about what changed.

ENVIRONMENT

       GIT_ANNEX_SHELL_READONLY

	      If set, disallows any command that could modify the repository.

       GIT_ANNEX_SHELL_LIMITED
	      If set, disallows running git-shell to handle unknown commands.

SEE ALSO

       git-annex(1)

       git-shell(1)

AUTHOR

       Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>

       <http://git-annex.branchable.com/>

																git-annex-shell(1)
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