Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm looking to use grep to pull up the information in the /etc/security/user file. If I use grep root /etc/security/user I'm assuming that I'll just get that one line, when I would like to get all the parameters below it but not for any other user. Is this possible?

Can you show what is in your user file currently and what text you want to extract from it?

If your file has content like this:

Code:

dhs:
    login = true
    rlogin = false
    ttys = /dev/console
    sugroups = security,!staff
    expires = 0531010090
    tpath = on
    admin = true
    auth1 = SYSTEM,METH2;dhs

Then:

Code:

# grep "^ " user

or:

Code:

grep -v ":$" user

Would get you all the lines apart from the "dhs:" line.

The file has great deal of users listed, but for example

tom:
login = true
rlogin = false
ttys = /dev/console
sugroups = security,!staff
expires = 0531010090
tpath = on
admin = true
auth1 = SYSTEM,METH2;dhs

jack:

login = true
rlogin = false
ttys = /dev/console
sugroups = security,!staff
expires = 0531010090
tpath = on
admin = true
auth1 = SYSTEM,METH2;dhs

root:
login = true
rlogin = false
ttys = /dev/console
admin = true

If you want say all the parameters for only the root user then you need to use awk(1) and help from an awkaleptic doing clever things with $1=="root:" (for example) to start printing and $1=="^$" to stop printing I think, anyone?

I'm not sure how to handle the second entry if it has a blank line after the user: line. However, if that is a typo you can use sed to get the data you want. This sed command will start printing output when it gets to a line that contains only "user:" and then stop printing when it gets to a blank line.

Code:

sed -n '/^user:$/,/^$/p' input_file

If you can't assume that an empty line will not appear somewhere in the information about a particular user then you could take what ldapwasndog has suggested and do this instead:

Code:

sed -n -e '/^user:$/,/:$/p' input_file | grep -v "^$" | grep -v ":$"

The first grep(1) removes any empty lines.
The second grep removes the username line of the user you wanted and the the next username which gets printed by the sed(1) command.

Just goes to show that there is 101 ways to do something in Unix, I think awk is the solution and someone comes up with a solution using sed and the requester was looking at grep!

AWK is your friend:

Code:

awk '/^john/,/^$/' /etc/securetty/user