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Lets create a script to get all user information, together

on Sysadmin, Medium, Linux, Scripting

In this tutorial I'd like to try something a little different, lets write a script together

đź‘Ť Normally I would never advocate copying and pasting anything directly from a website to your computer, but if you wish to copy and paste the lines from here, then it's your choice. I haven't hidden any nasty code anywhere, and I will explain every line of the script as we go along, so you know that nothing freaky will happen when you run my/our/your code on your system.

So lets get to it,

This will be a Linux bash script, so you can write this script in any linux based text editor you like, I will be using one called Vim but gedit will be fine

So first we need a file, lets create a file called "getuserinfo.sh" in your home directory

 cd ~ ; touch get_user_info.sh
  • cd ~ takes you to your home directory
  • touch is a command used to create files, in this case, getuserinfo.sh

ok, so now we have our file, just one more step and we can start editing it. We need to make the script 'executable', that is to say that we can 'execute/run' our script, to do that, do the following

chmod u+x ./get_user_info.sh

This will "change the mode" of our script to +x be executable.

to check we have the desired results, try this command,

ls -l ./get_user_info.sh

output:
-rwxr--r-- 1 sean 1049089 0 Aug  3 22:53 get_user_info.sh

The whole output is unimportant for this tutorial all that matters is that you have a little 'x' here: -rwxr--r--

if yes, then lets get scripting!

Lets do it!

Ok so, our script will collect as much information about the current user (you) as possible, and output it to the screen... in a neat and tidy way, sounds like a good first project.

lets open up the file, and as with all bash scripts the first line should look exactly like this,

#!/bin/bash

Lets not get into why just now, but just know, if youre creating a bash script, this should always be your first line! nothing more nothing less.. just remember ... "hash-bang/bin/bash"

TODO finish this tutorial