Shell Programming and Scripting

i found AWK is there a way i can use that to ask for input to search for the account then append LK to lock it delimeted by :

If this is a "Project" as you state, this forum is not to be used for School Projects.

1. Understand the contents of the shadow file:

Code:

man shadow
username:password:lastchg:min:max:warn:inactive:expire:flag
/etc/shadow  entries should appear in exactly the same order as  /etc/passwd  entries;

If you prepend *LK* to the beginning of a line in /etc/shadow, you will break things.
If you append *LK* to the end of the line, you may get unexpected results.

<soapbox>
Manually mangling /etc/shadow is problematic for the following reason:
If you corrupt the root entry, you will not be able to perform administrative tasks on the server, and will need to reboot from alternate media to repair.

There is a reason that we have commands like passwd. They are to ensure the integrity of the system as a whole. If you wish to bypass these safeties, you risk the entire environment.</soapbox>

yehhh its going to be on a test machine so if it breaks it breaks but im trying to append LK

to the correct field in the shadow field. How could i do that?

Copy the shadow file.
Create an account.
Lock that account with "passwd -l".
Compare shadow file with the copy (man diff).
Post the output from "diff" for the awk experts to see.