Shell Programming and Scripting

Try sourcing your tracklogin.sh. Executing it will do so in a sub shell, and this in turn is exited, not the main shell.

i tried the below line of code in my .profile

Code:

source ~/tracklogin.sh

then i tried logging in and got this error

Code:

.profile: source: not found

I do have the tracklogin.sh in my home directory for sure.

Code:

$ ls -ltr ~/tracklogin.sh
-rwxrwxr-x   1 user1 webuser       921 Aug 11 15:53 /home/webuser/user1/tracklogin.sh

When i fired the command on the command-line manually i got the below:

Code:

$ source ~/tracklogin.sh
ksh: : source: not found

Can you please comment.

As always, if you don't tell us what shell and operating system you're using, you're likely to get suggestions that won't work in your environment...

For ksh (and other POSIX conforming shells), change:

Code:

source ~/tracklogin.sh

to:

Code:

. ~/tracklogin.sh

Hmmm - are you running the bash or the ksh shell? I'm not sure ksh has the source buitlin command - try . instead.

I tried this but then it is going in INFINITE loop. See below output:

Code:

more .profile
. ~/tracklogin.sh

Output showing infinite loop as soon as i enter my credentials for login.

Code:

Enter a valid string
.profile[3]: read: no query process
Enter a valid string
.profile[3]: read: no query process
Enter a valid string
.....
....

Please suggest.

---------- Post updated at 05:23 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:20 PM ----------

Well i dont know. i am simply login in so i believe it got to be the default shell. One thing i can see is that it does execute the .profile file as i first login.

This is not the point Corona688 has raised: your script, when called from the login routine of a user, runs with the credentials of this user. To append the text the user enters to the log file the user has to be allowed to write to this file.

But because he is allowed to write the file he is also free to remove any content from the file - he could reduce it to zero length. So your whole mechanism is flawed from the beginning.

Since shell scripts cannot run as SUID (that is, run with the effective privileges of another user, not the one executing it) you will need to write a C- (or any other programming language you can compile to an object deck) program which takes the text and then writes it to a log file not writable by the user itself.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

By definition, where they can create files, they can delete files. Your scheme is flawed.