Oracle7 Administrator's Reference for UNIX

Administering Login Home Directories

To add or move login home directories without modifying programs that refer to them, you must:

refer to explicit path names in files designed to store them, such as /etc/passwd and /etc/oratab

refer to group memberships in the /etc/group file

It is not necessary to record a pathname except in a central reference file, because a user's home directory can be derived:

C shell and Korn shell users can use ~login to refer to a user's home directory.

Bourne shell users construct a simple program to do this. See the sample lhd script later in this section.

Similarly, group memberships are computed from /etc/group. See the sample grpx script later in this section.

Note: Local general-purpose utilities such as these should be stored in the /var/opt/bin directory.

Sample lhd Script

#!/bin/sh

# lhd - print login home directory name for a given user

# SYNTAX

# lhd [login]

# Cary Millsap, Oracle Services

# @(#)1.1 (93/05/17)

prog=`basename $0`

if [ $# -eq 0 ] ; then

        login=`whoami`

elif [ $# -eq 1 ] ; then

        login=$1

else

        echo "Usage: $prog login" >$2

        exit 2

fi

nawk -F: '$1==login {print $6}' login=$login /etc/passwd

Sample grpx Script

#!/bin/sh

# grpx - print the list of users belonging to a given group

# Cary Millsap, Oracle Services

# @(#)1.1 (93/07/04)

prog=`basename $0`

if [ $# -ne 1 ] ; then

        echo "Usage: $prog group" >&2

        exit 2

fi

g=$1

# calculate group id of g

gid=`nawk -F: '$1==g {print $3}' g=$g /etc/group`

# list users whose default group id is gid

u1=`nawk -F: '$4==gid {print $1}' gid=$gid /etc/passwd`

# list users who are recorded members of g

u2=`nawk -F: '$1==g {gsub(/,/," "); print $4}' g=$g /etc/group`

# remove duplicates from the union of the two lists

echo $u1 $u2 | tr " " "\012" | sort | uniq | tr "\012" " "

echo

Example: lhd and grpx

This example shows how the administrator can propagate a skeleton .profile file to the home directory for each member of a group. If the membership list of the clerk group changes, the code does not require modification.

$ for u in `grpx clerk` ; do

>     cp /etc/skel/.profile `lhd $u`

> done