Mirroring a user?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I'm looking for a way to mirror one user to another.

For example:

If I have the user ABC and I want to mirror his:

-Primary group
-Any other groups ABC belongs to
-UID
-Home directory

And create an exact copy over to another server to a user called XYZ. I already have SSH keys set up, don't worry about that, and I have the bulk of the code already .. but..

I'm having trouble writing the bit where it's like:

If

  • the user already exists, just use usermod to change XYZ attributes with all of ABC's info.

else

  • the user doesn't exist, use useradd to create the account XYZ with all of ABC's info.

Here is the bit of code for the usermod:

ssh -q $id@$servera "sudo usermod -d /home/${user1} -g $primgroup -G $grouplist -u $zaquid $user1"
ssh -q $id@$servera "echo "${user}:examplepass" | sudo chpasswd"

How do I write a statement that will execute that whole block of code, or different block of code. Should I put usermod command and the useradd command as a function and just do something like

if x
then usermod
else
useradd

But how do I determine if the user already has an account?

2

Putting usermod and useradd as functions looks more well arranged to me, and to determine whether the user has an account, execute "grep $user-name /etc/passwd";
for example, if I run this from my box :

grep "^${USERNAME}:" /etc/passwd

would return :

, having in mind that ${USERNAME} is preset within my "env"