Excellent! This is the right attitude.

Ok, but where do you get the information? In your original find-command you have searched certain directories and this will give you the users only if you know for sure that all the users you search have their home directories there. Is there a data structure in a Unix system which lists all the users and their home directories?

Ok, here is a tip: if in troubles, consult the "man-pages". Everybody does it (Unix expertise is about to know where to look rather than knowing everything.) There is especially one command you might need in your future career:

Code:

man -k <keyword>       searches all the man-articles for <keyword>
                        and lists the articles where <keyword> was found

No problem, we will eventually get to that. You are correct, "cmp" is a correct tool for that purpose.

Why "a correct" and not "the correct"? Because in Unix there are usually several ways to do something - in this case i had "diff" in mind when i asked you, but "cmp" is also correct, so use this. (This - the possibility to do things in several ways - often leads to what Unixers call "religious wars". Some people will be convinced that there is only "one true way" and usually half of them will think variant A as this one true way and the other half will think variant B as the one true way. Exorcism ensues and this is why Unix is said to give people a purpose in life. ;-) )

Well, this is easy and i will tell you because it can't be researched easily:

Suppose you have some process, which output is a list, like. You can set up a loop with the elements of the list as variable content using the following construct. It is called a "pipeline":

Code:

process | while read variable ; do
   do_something_with $variable
done

Here is an example. Try out "ls -1" as single command first to see what "goes into" the pipeline, only then try the whole script. It should be pretty self-explanatory:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

ls -1 | while read filename ; do
     print - "This is file: $filename"
done

Ok, report back when you have all the necessary information and we will continue with the last part of the script.

bakunin