Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello, I have a couple questions. First of all, I'm trying to use the wc command on the /etc/passwd file to find out the total amount of users but I am unsuccesful. I figured since users each have their own line in the passwd file that i could have it count the number of lines and then return the number and that number would be my total amount of users in the system. Also, this may seem like a stupid question but how do i save or overwrite a file in a shell script?

Thanks

A simple cat /etc/passwd | wc -l will give the total system users.

However, if are you trying to separate actual user's from system usernames?

You will need to test $UID's above the base user ID number, depending on your distro.

In my Fedora 13 system the base user ID is 500, and in my ubuntu 10.04 system, the base user ID is 1000.