Shell Programming and Scripting

Well the nawk command to do this is:

Code:

$ nawk -F:  -v OFS=: -v user="daemon" '$1 == user{$3="0"$3;} {print}' < /etc/passwd >/tmp/output

Wrapping that is a script to replace "daemon" with your particular user and move the output file should be pretty easy.

excellent, thank you! I will make the username field an argument on the script itself and our app security people can use this instead of modifying the passwd file directly.

this is working great. One scenario I didnt anticipate is if I need to add 2 zeros, 3, etc, to make it a total of 7 digits.

I put it in a while loop and that seems to function fine, but the nawk statement doesnt want to add a zero if its already leading with a zero. I am looking into exactly what your statement does but if you can tell me how to allow it to add a 2nd or 3rd zero that would be great.

If it's always supposed to be seven digits and you want to pad it with zeroes, the following should work:
Change $3="0"$3 to $3=sprintf("%07d", $3)

Regards,
Alister

perfect. thank you very much!