Shell Programming and Scripting

I want to create a usrname field for /etc/passwd file consisting of the first letter of the first name and the first 7 letters of the second name. I have got this so far -->

awk -F, '{print tolower(substr($1,0,1)) tolower(substr($1,match($1," ")+1,7))}' file1 > /tmp/data

Where file1 contains : John Doe,users,/bin/sh

However, I failed to realize that some people have punctuations in their name so this would not work if file1 contains ->
John Doe's,users,/bin/sh...
or for that matter -> 'Little John,users,/bin/sh

How do I get what is written into /tmp/data to contain only the first letter of the first name and the first 7 letters of the second name? Numbers can be included as well.

Thanks

Perhaps you could manipulate a call to adduser after altering the appropriate data?

Your script looks good to me... If your users give you bad data, you will have to filter out the bad characters... OR refuse to add a user if their provided data is bad...

How many users do you add a day/week? IF you have only a few users, it seems like you can just type then out manually to fix bad names.

The useradd command in HPUX is more than sufficent...Im sure your OS has a similar command.

How about this...

Code:

#!/usr/bin/ksh
typeset -L1 f1
typeset -L6 l6
typeset -l username

IFS=,
while read name group shell ; do
        fname=${name%% *}
        lname=${name##* }
        fname=$( echo $fname | sed 's,[^0-9a-zA-Z],,g')
        lname=$( echo $lname | sed 's,[^0-9a-zA-Z],,g')
        f1=$fname
        l6=$lname
        username=${f1}${l6}
        echo $username
done
exit 0