Shell Programming and Scripting

need help with a perl script which reads the user name and uses the /etc/password file as a data source to match the username i.e.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "\nPlease enter user number: ";
$id = <STDIN>;
#match $id with /etc/password file
print id and home directory

im sure there are a variety of ways to do this.

one could be.

put the passwd file into an array (@passwd).
read your username.
then you can grep out the username from the @passwd.
here you could use split and get the fields you want
then you can display your output.

you might want to prompt the user to hit CTRL-D after he is done entering his username. or you can wrap that up in a loop so for each entry it is executed.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#print "\nPlease enter user number: ";
#$id = <STDIN>;
$id = "$ARGV[0]";
#
#
$userinfo=`/usr/bin/grep $id /etc/passwd`;
($user1, $pass,$uid,$gid,$comment,$home,$extra) = split(/:/, $userinfo, 7);
if ( $uid eq $id ) {
print "$user1 $home /n ";
}

Used ARGV[0] instead of STDIN - and user number instead of username.

ok i ran this script as so

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#print "\nPlease enter user number: ";
#$id = <STDIN>;
$id = "$ARGV[0]";
#
#
$userinfo=`/usr/bin/grep $id /etc/passwd`;
($user1, $pass,$uid,$gid,$comment,$home,$extra) = split(/:/, $userinfo, 7);
if ( $uid eq $id ) {
print "$user1 $home /n ";
}

but the script does not let me enter instead it prints out this line
usr/bin/grep $id /etc/passwd

but then i took out the hash from this line #$id = <STDIN>;
which ould then ask me to enter a name/number but once entered it would not display the id and home directory

ne helps

Are you sure you indeed typed the backquotes ``, which is different from ''? Backquote shares the same keyboard key as ~ but without depressing the shift key.

Also, to run the program RTM gave you, you have to execute by

perl somescript.pl 500

i.e. with the user ID/number prepended.

But are you really interested in the user ID? If you want to find out the home directory from username, try instead

#!/usr/bin/perl

$id = "$ARGV[0]";
$userinfo=`grep $id /etc/passwd`;
($user1, $pass,$uid,$gid,$comment,$home,$extra) = split(/:/, $userinfo, 7);
if ( $user1 eq $id ) {
print "$user1 $home \n";
}


(I removed /usr/bin from grep because grep wasn't installed in /usr/bin on my system; and changed /n to \n, which is presumably a typo)

Since you asked for one thing, but put in your perl code another, I really didn't know what you wanted - versus
And I did note that I changed how my code was reading input.
Try changing the code or using the parts you need instead of asking for more help - it's part of the learning process. When you get stuck, then ask for more assistance.