Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello everyone, I am new to the forum community and need help with some scripts. First off let me put that this is “NOT” a homework assignment as I have been given this information where I work (IUPUI-UITS) and need help on this since I have no experience in this area. The only reason I am turning to forum posting is the person that ran the system is no longer available and now it is on me to run this so I am trying to find out whatever information I can. I just want to see what people may suggest about the code posted and good sites that may relate to what I am asking.


I have attached what I have been given so far and these are scripts that have been passed on to me. To tell the truth I have never really worked with scripts and have no clue how these even work (so any information or help that is dumbed down would be beneficial). The person that passed this on to me is no longer is available to be reached and they did not provide any documentation on this information.



I know the scripts are supposed to create new users to be used with mysql and phpmyadmin on a server. My questions are how do these even work and what do they do? Also if anyone has suggestions on how to make these more effective and secure feel free to try and help out or point me in the right direction. Another thing that I was wondering with these is how would I go about making changes to allow tracking of the accounts created and to create a script to remove all files associated with a specific user and have it stored in an archive. Thanks everyone and I appreciate you help.

Just a few comments on the scripts:
create_accts.sh does not do what its name promises, it rather loops through all files in the directory given, prints each file's name and its contents, word by word. To put it better, it would do that, weren't there some errors in the script that make it unuseable. Please give a warm hearted thank you to your predecessor!
new.sh seems to set up a user account after checking if already present or not. The only flaw I see is that it encrypts the password before passing it to useradd which would encrypt it again, making the whole thing unuseable again.
undoscript.pl is the most useless compilation of perl commands I've ever seen.