Home Directory Location Code

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hello All,
I am a teacher at a local high school, and we have put together a small computer and loaded a linux distro onto it for the students to experiment with, because 20 children share the computer, it is hard to keep track of there home directorys,

i was wondering if i could find a script for the location of the users home directory, so i could load a terminal, type in the command followed by the users name, and i could find where the users home directory is, i know i can see it in the /ect/password, but a script would be much easier

any help would be greatly appriciated

2

from a bash shell do the following

echo ~username

so if you have user fred, try

echo ~fred
3

Also, you should have standard rules for managing the computer, for example, putting all home directories under "/home" or similar, so fred's home directory should be "/home/fred".

4

thanks, but is there another way of doing it through the bash shell? :confused:
Maybe Using the Grep Command and the Cut Command to Give Me and Entire Line of Information from the etc/Passwd on the user?

thanks

5

The mechanism I have shown you is the simplest. You are welcome to make things more complex for yourself.

6

As porter said, this is more difficult and gets the same results as his suggestion, but if you really wanted to grep and cut the /etc/passwd file you could:

grep username /etc/passwd | cut -d ":" -f 6

or awk

grep username /etc/passwd | awk 'BEGIN {FS="[:]"} { print $6 }'
7

Thanks for your help so far guys, im almost done now, there is just one bit i need help with, i would like it to display a reply for a user who doesnt exist, such as, User Not found or similar

This is my code so far

echo "Which Users home directory to you want to locate?"
read Username
grep "^$Username" /etc/passwd | cut -d ":" -f 6

I was reading somewhere about a case or something
something about using

if [ $? -eq 0  ]

:confused:

Thanks Again

8

How about

finger $Username >/dev/null 2>&1
if test "$?" != "0"
then
     echo user does not exist
fi
9

What does the F/dev/null 2>&1 Do?

10

>/dev/null means write stdout to /dev/null, the bit-bucket

2>&1 means put stderr in the same place as stdout

Who is the adminstrator for this system?

Nominate one of your tech-savvy students.

11

Another way:

userentry=$(getent passwd $username)
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
        echo "$username does not exist"
        exit 1
fi
/usr/bin/echo "${username}'s home directory is \c"
echo "$userentry" | cut -d: -f6