Shell Programming and Scripting

I use a login window manager from (its free)http://www.bombich.com/mactips/loginhooks.html
and this uses unix to login hook (LoginHook (POSIX path)) and it allows you to store a script on the hardrive or server and executes it at login. It runs the script with root permissions ( I assume) otherwise I don't think it would be able to create directories and sub directories. Theres good info on this page (link above) eg
Create a shell script to be run upon login. The name of the script is not important, as long as it is the same as what you will indicate in step 4. Note that the name of the user logging in is sent as an argument ($1) to this script. You can also download this basic script and copy it to /Library/Management (you may have to create this folder). Be sure to check out my Scripts Library for several other scripts that perform various tasks.

All my client machines are Mac osx 10.35 with an Admin and Root local users. Everyone else who logs in are not local users but are located on an Xserve LDAP binded database.

The reason I am trying to create certain directories locally for users as they login rather than have them on the server is because we run a wireless network that can't cope with huge movie and music files.

I hope this clears things a little.

Thanks

Do you think I need to change the $CURRUSER to $1

Yes, give that a try. Note that for this to work, the script will be executed as follows:

your_script_name.sh user_name

Inside of your script, change CURRUSER=`whoami` to CURRUSER=$1

After changing the script so that CURRUSER=$1 the script creates the directories for all users that login.

The 2 things it still does not do is:
1. Exit the script when local admin users login.

2. Remove the network Movie and Music directories and create virtual linked directories to the ones on the local drive (users/shared/..).

It seems we are starting to get close.

Any suggestions to try next.

This may be the way to go

Problems are probably due to the script running as root which means ~ still resolves to root's home.

What you should probably do is change CURRUSER $(logname) or even just $USER for that matter.

create a new shell script:

#!/bin/sh

sudo -u $1 -H <pathToOriginalScript>

exit 0


Make this one your LoginHook.

This will run your script as the user logging instead of running it as root, and set the ~ variable to the target users $HOME.

You may also want to use 'id -Gn' instead of 'groups' as 'groups' has been made obsolete by 'id'.