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writing a script that looks up a username in the password file?
I am working on script that looks up a given username in the system's /etc/passwd file, producing on the command line the user's real name. I was wondering what the best way was to do this because I am not sure how to approach it. Any help would be great.
1 Answer
- potatocouchLv 510 years agoFavorite Answer
that file is split into parts by colons. therefore, you can grep to grab the right line and then awk to grab the right field. let's say the "real name" column is the 8th one.
grep the_username /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{print $8}'
in your script you'll replace the_username by the variable that was inputted, eg $input_username
