Shell Programming and Scripting

this is how i would do it.
just so you know tho perl has a built in grep function.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

while( <STDIN> ) {
chop ($_);
($name,$passwd,$uid,$gid,$quota,$comment,$gcos,$dir,$shell) = getpwnam("$_");
print "uname:$name uid:$uid home:$dir\n";
}

you can prolly slim it down to (getpwnam("$_"))[0,2,7];


but generally:

You have a couple of ways of importing the data. (provided perl dosent have a built in function to read the file as in this example) One of the most popular is loading the data into a control structure (array/hash/combo) or working right off the file handle.

so let say you have x file and you need to work with it. you can do something like this (from the perl cookbook)

Code:

This is from the perl cookbook. ties a file to an array.

use Tie::File;
use Fcntl;

tie(@lines, Tie::File, $FILE, mode => O_RDWR) or die "Cannot tie file $FILE: $!\n";


OR you can do something like this. not from the cook book.
open(FILEHANDLE,"filename") or die;
while (<FILEHANDLE>) {do something};

RTM did that help at all? if not toss me some stuff and i will try to explane it better. i am rather fortunet and have a variety of perl books on hand along w/ the latest cd bookself so i should be able to answer a fair amount for ya.

Optimus P - Cool. Thanks for the info. I think I have used something like it once, but didn't recall it. I'll try to remember for next time (actually doing any scripts has been so few and far between for the last 2 years it's hard to remember how to do much of anything any more).

Perderabo - fyi - the person was looking for a uid not account name (
see post )

Same deal applies to uid. I got 3 lines with:
grep 300 /etc/passwd
but only one line with
grep '^.*:.*:300:' /etc/passwd

but in the context of your search patter the user would not be entering in the first 3 fields of the password filed they woudl only be entering in a username i believe.

no matter tho we are getting way off the topic of efficiency

Well, ok...

id=300
grep '^.*:.*:'${id}':' /etc/passwd

The point is that you need to search in such a way that you get what you're looking for.

And RTM says it is uid, not user name.