Archive for February, 2010

Creating Home Directories from /etc/passwd

06th February
2010
written by Chris

I recently had to create a number of home directories from the user accounts in the /etc/passwd file because Webmin didn't create them when the user was created. Don't ask me why. Webmin is a mystery and only does things it feels like doing at the time it does them. But I digress..

The first thing I did was to create file with all users that have directories.

cat /etc/passwd | sed 's/:/ /g' | awk '($5 ~ /\//) { print $1 " " $5}' > file.txt

Edit the file you created and remove things like the postfix directory and other non-user account directories.

Next, run the command to create all of the home directories and then change their ownership to the user.

while read line; do mydir=`echo $line |awk '{print $2}'`; myuid=`echo $line| awk '{print $1}'`;  mkdir $mydir 2>/dev/null; chown $myuid:$myuid $mydir; done < file.txt
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linux