finger command

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Hello all,

Here is what I am trying to do. If a user exist, then send an echo "EXIST" or else "DOES NOT EXIST". (under HP-UX)

Kind of:

#!/usr/bin/sh
USER=mylogin

finger $USER

if $? = 0
then
     echo "EXIST""
else
     echo "DOES NOT EXIST"
fi

Does not work at all. Any idea?

2

I have no access to HP-UX and finger is not present in my system.
But I would try "who" piped to "grep" for this purpose.

3

It should be

if [ $? -eq 0 ];
4

Checked on HP-UX system

......................................
#!/usr/bin/sh
USER=mylogin

finger $USER > /dev/null ### Will not display the output of finger command

if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
echo "EXIST""
else
echo "DOES NOT EXIST"
fi
........................................

5

Finger is disabled on all our servers, just like talk, and rwall are.

You would be better of getting the info from the passwd file.

6

finger wont help as when I gave bogus username it still gave and o/p for $? as 0

Cheers,

7

Try:

cat /etc/passwd | grep username 1>/dev/null 2>&1

if [ $? != 0 ]
then
echo user does not exist
else
echo user does exist
fi

8

a far better way, becasue it works irrespective of the where the passwd entries are stored would be:

getent passwd username > /dev/null 2>&1
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]] ; then
   echo user exists
else
   echo user soes not exists
fi
9

What is getent???

can you explain the same.

cheers

10

Doesn't HP have the id command?

11

This works in HP-UX:

if id username >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  echo "username exists"
else
  echo "username doesn't exist"
fi

Or as a one-liner:

id username >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo "exists" || echo "doesn't exist"