Shell Programming and Scripting

HI,

Please help, i am new to this.

I have a list of user's ID in excel file and i want to run against /etc/passwd (on server). And capture the output like this. If the user has noshell then output userId, name and write “notshell” if use has she then useid, name and write “SHELL” how do I script it or what command should I use to get output.

Thanks for your help.

here i check the lenght of the shell field which is the last field in /etc/passwd file. you may do some other check if you want to.

awk -F":" ' {
if ( length($NF) > 0 )
printf("%s %s SHELL\n", $1, $5)
else
printf("%s %s notshell\n", $1, $5)
}' /etc/passwd;

I think you need to change $NF to the actual number of the last field in the passwd file, for instance $7 in my case...
I don't think all fields have to be present in a passwd file, so $NF may end up effectively checking $6 or $5, depending on how many fields are present.

I don't think so.....
A shorter version might be:

Code:

awk -F: '{
    printf("%s %s %s\n", $1, $5, (length($NF)) ? "SHELL" : "notshell")
}' /etc/passwd

I agree with vgersh99, the reason for usin $NF, and not a literal value is exactly because you don't know how many fields are populated.

Apologies. I made the mistake of thinking you could have 'missing' fields in the passwd file, but the same fields are always there, just not always populated as you said.