Shell Programming and Scripting

I've always written scripts where the user executes the script and I prompt them for what they want to do.

But I'm trying to write a script where root executes the script 'lock' or its hard-link 'unlock' and the script will passwd -l or passwd -u an account depending on the choice.

What would be my best way to "read" what the user input was at the cli?

So basically I want

xxx@xxx# lock bob
or
xxx@xxx# unlock bob

CHECK if root is executing the script
READ user input at the cli
CHECK if the account exists
CHECK if the account is already locked/unlocked
LOCK/UNLOCK

Thanks

---------- Post updated at 07:25 PM ---------- Previous update was at 06:18 PM ----------

Experimenting with $0 right now. Seems like the right track?

You can check the roots privileges by testing EUID. If EUID==0, then the caller has roots powers.

Check if the account exists: look at /etc/passwd. You can see all users there. /etc/groups stores the groups.

Lock/unlock: create a lock file and test for its existence. You can then even gather other interesting info, like when the user invoked your script (timestamp of lockfile).

Actually what I ended up doing is something like

Code:

if [[ $0 == "lock"]]; then ...

So now if it's true I know the user wants to lock and if it's false I know he wants an unlock.

Makes sense?

Mmmm... ok. But if the user calls the script from current dir, like

Code:

 ./lock

or with full path, like

Code:

 /path/to/lock

your test will fail. Furthermore, you will need 2 scripts, that are actually doing one thing, so if you want to make some changes, you'll have to maintain two files. I would stick it all into one file, and decide whether to lock or unlock with a switch. Then you can create alias in /etc/profle, for example, like:

Code:

 alias 'unlock=/path/to/lockScript -u'

so that you can just call 'unlock' from CL.