Shell Programming and Scripting

1. Accept a “userid” as a command line argument
2. Produce the following output:
User userid has a home directory of /path/directory
the default shell for this user is /path/shell
3. At this level, it may be assumed that the “userid” is a unique string in the file that is being searched
4. Provide a suitable error message if the user does not exist
5. Trap any error messages generated by programs called by the script using either I/O redirection or
pre-validation of program arguments
6. Successfully deals with userids that are substrings of other userids
e.g. Two users in the system, “foo” and “foobar” -
Standard search tools, without specifying a correct search string would find both “foo” and “foobar”
when searching for “foo”
Meeting this requirement means selecting just “foo” and not both

anyone can help me with this? very urgent!

Define the problem, no need scream in subject. Subject is interesting or not.
You have accepted the rules.

Make some script ex. xxx:

Code:

#!/bin/sh 
userid="$1"
# grep user, userid + delimiter, then it's uniq
data=`grep "^$userid:" /etc/passwd 2>/dev/null `
# if you have ksh, bash, dash, ... then syntax is (previous also works but ...)
#data=$(  grep "^$userid:" /etc/passwd 2>/dev/null  )
[ "$data" = "" ] && echo "not user $userid" >&2 && exit 1
echo "ok"

And chmod a+rx xxx
and call ex. ./xxx root

sorry for the in appropriate post, but this is some how really urgent for me.

i dont know how or why, but it always returning not user value even when the data inside is matched.
i try another program which quite near to what i shoudl do, but i just cant get the right argument for it. this is teh code i made

for myUSER in `awk -F: '{print $1}' passwd`
do
myUID=`awk -F: '{if ($1 == "'$myUSER'") print $3}' passwd`
if [ $myUID -lt $SysAcct ] || [ $myUID -gt $Special1 -a $myUID -lt $Special2 ] ; then
printf "%s is a system account\n" $myUSER
else
myHOME=`awk -F: '{if ($1 == "'$myUSER'") print $6}' passwd`
mySHELL=`awk -F: '{if ($1 == "'$myUSER'") print $7}' passwd`
printf "%s has a home directory %s and uses the %s shell\n" $myUSER $myHOME $mySHELL
fi
done

Hi Grandios,

what the "passwd" here stands for ???

I suspect you should use "/etc/passwd".

oh yha, i put the etc, its just my previous code. i put etc/passwd but still not giving me the result i want

There are many variable you are using in the script like :SysAcct , Special2 and not sure what these variables holding and difficult guess what went wrong.

and the path should be : /etc/passwd and not etc/passwd

those variable are used to detect whether the myUser are included in system account or not. if not then they will print thr home directory etc. the problem is, i dont know how to get the account from myUSER to userid (own created variable rather than built in)