Re: home directories...

[Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@msu.edu>]

Bradley Bell <bradleyb@u.washington.edu> writes:

   On Sat, 28 Aug 1999, Oliver Elphick wrote:

   >   >What routines should one use when parsing /etc/passwd?
   >  
   > awk -F: '{if ($3 > 999) print $1}' </etc/passwd

   Yes, the idea is that it should work no matter where the home directories
   are.  I guess I'll probably go the awk route, but I thought there might be
   a more standard way of doing it.

I don't like the idea of parsing /etc/passwd very much.  The C library
provides routines for iterating /etc/passwd.  What's more, they also
work if home directories are stored in NIS+ or whatever instead of
being in the actual /etc/passwd file.  You should use them.  

Perl has a simple interface to these functions.  Use `perldoc -f
setpwent' for more information.

Example that prints all users names' along with their home
directories:

#! /usr/bin/perl
while (my ($user, $home) = (getpwent ())[0,7]) {
    print "$user\t$home\n";
}