Shell Programming and Scripting

yeah $USER is a system variable. Is the name (alex, george, root or anything) of the person who ran the script.
Thx for your answers I'll try them out and then I'll let you know.

Not on my system or any unix system I have seen.
The basic environment variables set on login are usually listed in "man login". Of course this might not be unix or the variable might be set in /etc/profile or the user .profile .... ?

What Operating System do you have?
If you login normally do you get a value in $USER for both a "root" and a normal user ?

As for Corona688's question, the program is supposed to scan some things in every user separately and print the results in the $current directory, unless there is any folder or file in the $current directory (if you noticed, the $current directory is the dir from where the script was executed)

---------- Post updated at 12:05 PM ---------- Previous update was at 12:03 PM ----------

methyl, it is a system variable. Look this:

I have checked on HP-UX,Solaris and Linux. its there.
But yes, it is not listed in man login and as said, I have found this in /etc/profile.

Code:

if [ -x /usr/bin/id ]; then
        USER="`id -un`"
        LOGNAME=$USER
        MAIL="/var/spool/mail/$USER"
fi

We shouldn't refer this as a environment/system variable. But the point is, do we generally edit the /etc/profile?

More detail please? I'd just get the needed info from your program if I knew it worked, but currently it doesn't, and if it did you wouldn't be asking anyway. Plus there's no sample data at all.

Sorry, I don't want to give further information about it
I don't think that's up to the point to solve the problem, because it hasn't to do with this.... Anyway, I have to say that the program was working fine. Only when root user ran it twice then the output was full of errors (because then it couldn't overwrite the files and the folder that were created). One solution is to force-copy the file (overwrite the existing) but i want to avoid the script to do all this searching to collect info about each user and then to overwrite the already existing folders and files. I wanted to avoid this and then I tried to make this code in case the user is root to recognize if there is any folder or file with a user's name in the same folder and then run something else immediately.... it is simple.

The program runs something if there information isn't there and then runs the ./runit
If the things that wanted to collect are there then avoid collecting the info and run .runit immediately! Simple...
The thing is that I cannot locate my error!

Forgive my bluntness but, with the script as written, "working" is a tenuous condition. So long, hope you get it working right.