Shell Programming and Scripting

Go easy on me - first post

I need a simple script that will mount a directory in the /home folder of all users. I need to run this on boot and regular intervals as a cron job. I was hoping to achieve this by modifying fstab but it is not possible and I would like to avoid symlinks.

I have no scripting experience. Thanks for any help.

Can you say why it needs to be done at "regular intervals" if it's done "on boot", and why you need to avoid symbolic links?

After all symbol links would make life much easier.

Thanks for your reply,
Actually you're right, it will only need to run at boot and when a new user is added.

I wanted to avoid symlinks as I want to jail users to their home folder for ftp access.

A simple script would be:

Code:

ls /home | xargs -n1 -I{} mount /some/place /home/{}

But it's hardly scientific (being simple, and making many assumptions)

Thanks for this, I will have a go over the weekend.

For my education could you explain how the script works and what assumptions it makes?
Thanks again

It works by listing the /home directory and running the mount command against each of them.

The assumptions would be that /home is the correct directory, and is a directory, not a link to where that directory actually is; that users are local users and not remote (like AD / LDAP) users with auto-mounted home directories; and that there's nothing in "/home" that isn't a user's home directory. That kind of thing! Generally the kind of assumptions anyone could make without knowing exactly how your setup looks.

Thanks for your help.

The home directory is on a separate partition and mounted as /home from the fstab, the users login to a samba PDC via LADP but have a real local user accounts stored in /home/username. I assume this script will still work?

Also, how do get the script to check the directory for the mount point exists and create it if it does not?
Thanks