Sorry, but this is not how it works: you will write your script! And while we will assist you, explain things to you, correct your code if necessary and help you in any possible way - we will not write it for you.


OK, two things: first a question. There are generalised user-directory services which could be used for that: LDAP, NIS, DCE, ... Why don't you use one of these? All the mentioned UNIX/Linux flavours could be brought to cooperate with these services and you would not even have to create or maintain local users.

Second, reagrding the script itself: it is possible to do this and in fact i have done so. Notice that - to do it right - this is an effort worth several thousand lines of code. Not even an expert in scripting will be able to do it in some spare minutes to kill. This is a regular software engineering project and you should treat it that way from the start. This means before you can write even one line of code you need a thorough plan, you need to have thought things through and you need to have a detailed and concise idea of what you are going to do - "manage users on many systems" is like "i want to design a car". As long as you do not know how motors, gearboxes, brakes, etc. work this will not succeed.

OK, let us start by planning some basics. Every user is identified by a user name and a (unique) ID. Usually you find both informations in a file called /etc/passwd. You might want to start by not creating a user account but a script (function) that just checks if a user exists already.

Now think about what could come out for such a check. Here are some sample conditions, you might find more:

- the file /etc/password doesn't exist or isn't readable
- the user name exists in an account, but with another UID
- the user ID exists in an account, but with another name
- both user name and ID exist, but in different users
- the user name exists and has the correct ID (-> this is the "success" case)

All these (and probably more, be creative) conditions will have to be checked and reported (to an eventual calling program) by the check-function/-script.

You should have an idea now of what it takes to do what you want and start the design process.

I hope this helps.

bakunin